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BY TEE SAME AUTHOR 

THE PATIENT OBSERVER 

THROUGH THE OUTLOOKING GLASS 

POST IMPRESSIONS 

SINBAD AND HIS FRIENDS 

LITTLE JOURNEYS TOWARD PARIS 

PROFESSOR LATIMER'S PROGRESS 




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The Spires of St. Patrick's Lift arove a Vast and 
Moving Throng 



BELSHAZZAR COURT 



OR 



VILLAGE LIFE IN 
NEW YORK CITY 



BY 



SIMEON STRUNSKY 



I] 



Pictures by 
WALTER JACK DUNCAN 




NEW YORK 

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 



.5' 



Copyright, 1914, 1922, 
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 



Portions of this volume were copy- 
righted separately as follows : 

In Belshazzar Court, copyright, 
1913, by The Atlantic Monthly Com- 
pany. 

The Street, The Show, The Game, 
and School, copyright, 1914, by The 
Atlantic Monthly Company. 

Nipht Life, The Lane That Has 
IVo Turning, Downtown, The Shop- 
pers, Academic Heights. The City's 
Ragged Edges, by Harper and 
Brothers. 



PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. BY 

THE QUINN a BODEN COMPANY 

RAHWAY. N. J 



JUL 2\ 1922 

©C1.A674 9 99 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER 



FAOB 



I. In Belshazzar Court ... 3 

II. The Street 28 

III. The Show . . . . . 50 

IV. The Game 73 

V. Night Life 93 

VI. Laurelmere 117 

VII. School 145 

VIII. Harold and the Universe . .169 

IX. The Lane That Has No Turning 191 

X. Down-Town 214 

XL The Shoppers .... 237 

XII. Academic Heights .... 258 

XIII. The City's Ragged Edges . . 281 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

The spires of St. Patrick's lift above a vast 

and moving throng . . . Frontispiece 

Fifth Avenue below Fourteenth Street . 26 

At Thirty-fourth Street the traffic thickens 100 

When the curtain of night rises on River- 
side 182 

Steps that rise in a succession of granite 
waves lead to the library . . . 259 

Fishing Smacks at Fulton Market . . 281 



BELSHAZZAR COURT 



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\' V. I' 



IN BELSHAZZAR COURT 

Our apartment house has all-night elevator 
service. We have grown accustomed to being 
awakened in the middle of the night by the sound 
of violent hammering on the iron door of the ele- 
vator shaft, the object of which is to attract the 
attention of the operator, who is in the habit of 
running up his car to the top floor and going to 
sleep in the hall, being roused only with the great- 
est difficulty. Tenants have complained of the 
inconvenience ; especially when one comes home 
late from an after-theater supper at a Broadway 
hotel. In deference to such complaints our ele- 
vator boys are constantly being discharged, but 
the tradition of going to sleep on the top floor 
seems to be continuous. 

One of the reasons for this, I imagine, is that 
our landlord underpays his help and is conse- 
quently in no position to enforce discipline. How- 
ever, I speak almost entirely on information and 
belief, my personal experience with the all-night 

3 



4 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

elevator having been confined to a single instance. 
That was when we came back from our vacation 
last summer at an early hour in the morning and 
rang the bell without eliciting any response. In- 
asmuch as we live only two flights up, we walked 
up the stairs, I carrying a suit-case, a hand-bag 
and the baby, and Emmeline carrying another 
suit-case and leading by the hand our boy Harold, 
who was fast asleep. 

During the day our elevator is frequently 
out of order. The trouble, I believe, is with the 
brake, which every little while fails to catch, so 
that the car slides down a floor or two and sticks. 
It is quite probable that if our elevator boys re- 
mained long enough to become acquainted with 
the peculiar characteristics of the machinery in 
Belshazzar Court such stoppages would come less 
often. But no serious accidents have ever oc- 
curred, to my knowledge, and personally, as I 
have said, I suff'er little inconvenience, since it is 
no trouble at all to walk up two flights of stairs. 

But it is diff'erent with Emmeline, who worries 
over the children. She will not allow the baby to 
be taken into the car. Instead, she makes the 
nurse ride up or down with the go-cart, and 
has her fetch the baby by the stairs. Em- 
meline complains that in cold weather this 



IN BELSHAZZAR COURT 5 

necessitates her own going downstairs to tuck the 
child into her cart, a duty which cannot possibly 
be delegated. It also exposes the baby to 
draughts while she is being taken out of the cart 
in the hall, preparatory to being carried upstairs. 
But Emmeline would rather take that chance than 
have the elevator drop with baby, as happened 
twice during the first week after we moved in. I 
have sometimes argued with her on the subject, 
maintaining that there cannot be any real danger 
when the safety of the elevator is guaranteed by 
no less than three casualty companies; but Em- 
meline says that is a detached point of view which 
she cannot share. Our boy Harold is under strict 
injunctions to walk. He finds it a deprivation, 
after having twice tasted the joy of being 
marooned between floors, whence he was rescued 
by means of a ladder. 

It is on account of the large bedrooms that we 
selected this particular apartment house and cling 
to it in spite of certain obvious disadvantages. 
That is, there is really one bedroom only which 
can be called very large, but it has a fair amount 
of sunlight and it faces on an open court. Harold 
has the music-room, which landlords formerly 
used to call the back parlor. It faces on the 
avenue and makes an excellent sleeping-room and 



6 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

play-room for the boy. Such rooms are almost 
impossible to find in a tolerable neighborhood for 
the really moderate rent we pay. That is, my rent 
is just a little more than I can afford; neverthe- 
less you would think it reasonable if you saw what 
a fine appearance our apartment house makes. It 
has a fa9ade in Flemish brick, with bay windows 
belted by handsome railings of wrought iron upon 
narrow stone balconies. It also has a mansard 
cornice painted a dull green, which is visible sev- 
eral blocks away over the roofs of the old-fash- 
ioned flats by which our house is surrounded. 

Our friends, when they come to see us for the 
first time, are impressed with Belshazzar Court. 
You pass through heavy grilled doors into a 
marble-lined vestibule which is separated by a 
second pair of massive doors from the spacious 
main hall. This hall is gay with an astonishingly 
large number of handsome electroliers in imita- 
tion cut glass. There is also a magnificent marble 
fireplace in which the effect of a wood fire is 
simulated by electric bulbs under a sheet of red- 
colored isinglass. The heat is furnished by a 
steam radiator close by. The floor has two large 
Oriental rugs of domestic manufacture. There is 
a big leather couch in front of the fireplace. 
Everywhere are large, comfortable, arm-chairs in 



IN BELSHAZZAR COURT 7 

which I have often thought it would be pleasant 
to lounge and smoke, but I have never had the 
time. On a mahogany table, in the center, the 
day's mail is displayed. I have sometimes glanced 
over the letters in idle curiosity and found that 
they consist largely of circulars from clothing 
firms and dyeing establishments. The chandeliers 
usually have a number of the crystal prisms 
broken or missing. The rugs are fairly worn, but 
doubtless the casual visitor does not notice that. 
The general effect of our main hall is, as I have 
said, imposing. Sunday afternoons there are 
several motor-cars lined up in front of the house. 
The number of young children in our apart- 
ment house is not large, a dozen or fifteen, per- 
haps. The house has six stories and there are 
nine apartments to the floor, so you can figure out 
for yourself the rate of increase for the popula- 
tion of Belshazzar Court. My own contribution 
to the infant statistics of our apartment house 
is apparently between one-sixth and one-eighth of 
the total number. Moreover, if you calculate not 
by mere number but by the amount of vital energy 
liberated, my own share is still larger. For there 
is no denying the justice of the hall boys' com- 
plaint that our Harold creates more disturbance 
in the house than any other three children. The 



8 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

missing prisms in the hall chandeliers are in con- 
siderable degree to be attributed to Harold. Not 
that he has a predilection for electroliers. He is 
just as hard on shoes and stockings. The former 
he destroys in a peculiar manner. As he walks 
upstairs, he carefully adjusts the upper of his 
shoe, just over the arch, to the edge of each step, 
and scrapes toward the toe slowly but firmly. 
When in good form he can shave the toes from a 
new pair of shoes in a single afternoon, and I 
have known him to reduce his footgear, within a 
week, to a semblance of degraded destitution that 
is the despair and mortification of his mother. 

However, it must not be supposed that Harold 
is unpopular with the working staff of Belshazzar 
Court. The only apparent exception is the house 
superintendent, who is held responsible for all 
damage accruing to halls and stairways. His 
point of view is therefore quite comprehensible. 
But even the bitter protests of the house superin- 
tendent are not, I imagine, a true index to his 
permanent state of feeling with regard to Harold. 
At least I know that after the superintendent has 
called up Emmeline on the telephone to complain 
of Harold's fondness for tracing patterns on the 
mahogany hall table with a wire nail, the boy has 
been found in the cellar watching the stoking of 



IN BELSHAZZAR COURT 9 

the furnace with bated breath, a privilege con- 
ferred on but few. The superintendent has also 
given Harold the run of a great pile of cinders 
and ashes which occasionally accumulates near 
the furnace doors. From such excursions the 
boy returns with the knees of his stockings en- 
tirely gone, and only the blue of his eyes discern- 
ible through a layer of coal dust which lends him 
an aspect of extraordinary ferocity. 

And yet I believe it is Harold's clamorous 
career through life that is the secret of his popu- 
larity with the people in our house. When he 
walks down the stairs it sounds like a catastrophe. 
He engages in furious wrestling bouts with the 
hall boys, whose life he threatens to take in the 
most fiendishly cruel manner. His ability to 
" lick " the elevator boy and the telephone 
operator single-handed is an open secret to any- 
one who has ever met Harold. But as I have said, 
there are very few children in the house, and I 
imagine that the sound of him engaging in mortal 
combat with the elevator boy and the clatter of 
his progress down the stairs echo rather grate- 
fully at times through the long, somber hall- 
ways. 

I am an eyewitness of Harold's popularity on 
Sunday mornings when Emmeline and I, with both 



10 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

the children, ride down in the elevator for our 
weekly stroll along the Boulevard. My bodily 
presence on Sunday so far removes my wife's ap- 
prehensions with regard to the elevator that she 
will consent to take the baby down in the car. On 
such occasions I have observed that our neighbors 
invariably smile at Harold. Sometimes they will 
ask him how soon and in just what way he in- 
tends to destroy the new hall boy, or they will 
reach out a hand and pluck at his ear. The 
women in the car content themselves with smiling 
at him. 

Harold's friends, who thus salute him on Sun- 
day morning, usually carry or lead a small dog 
or two which they are taking out for the daily 
exercise. There are a large number of small dogs 
in our apartment house. I don't pretend to know 
the different breeds, but they are nearly all of 
them winsome little beasts, with long, silky pelts, 
retrousse noses, and eyes that blink fiercely at you. 
Their masters are as a rule big, thick-set men, 
well advanced toward middle age, faultlessly 
dressed, and shaven to the quick. Or else the 
small dogs repose in the arms of tall, heavy women, 
who go mercilessly corseted and pay full tribute 
to modern requirements in facial decoration. 
They seem to lay great store by their pets, but 



IN BELSHAZZAR COURT 11 

they also find a kind glance for Harold. Some- 
times I imagine it is a different glance which they 
turn from their little dogs to Harold — a softer 
look, with the suggestion of wonder in it. From 
Harold and the baby they usually glance at Em- 
meline. I pass virtually unnoticed. 

I have mentioned the baby. When she is with 
us, Harold does not monopolize our neighbors' 
attention. It would be odd if it were otherwise. 
I am not so partisan as Emmeline in this matter, 
but I am inclined to think she is right when she 
says that our baby's eyes, of a liquid grayish-blue, 
staring in fascination out of the soft, pink swell 
of her cheeks, cannot help going straight to the 
heart of every normally constituted bystander. 
The women with small dogs in their arms smile at 
Harold, but they will bend down to the baby and 
hold out a finger to her and ask her name. Under 
such circumstances the behavior of Emmeline is 
rather difficult to explain. She is proud and 
resentful at the same time. Her moral judg- 
ments are apt to be swift and sharp, and when 
we are alone she has often characterized these 
neighbors of ours — the women, I mean — in pretty 
definite terms. Her opinion of women whose in- 
terests are satisfied by a husband and a toy dog 
would please Mr. Roosevelt, I imagine. Yet she 



12 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

never fails to tell me of the extraordinary charm 
our baby exerts on these very people whose out- 
look upon life and aesthetic standards she 
thoroughly despises. "^ 

I have a confession to make. Sometimes, dur- 
ing our encounters in the elevator with our close- 
shaven, frock-coated neighbors and their fashion- 
ably dressed wives, I have looked at Emmeline's 
clothes and made comparisons not to her discredit 
but to my own. I should like Emmeline to cut as 
fine a figure as her neighbors, occasionally. Our 
neighbors' wives on a Sunday are dazzling in 
velvets and furs and plumes, whereas Emmeline 
has a natural disinclination for ostrich feathers 
even if we could afford to go in for such things. 
Her furs are not bad, but they are not new. They 
have worn well during the four years she has had 
them ; nevertheless they are not new. 

I am not hinting at shabbiness. That is the 
last thing you would think of if you saw Emmeline. 
An exquisite cleanliness of figure, a fine animation 
in the eyes and the cut of her lips, an electric 
youthfulness of gesture — I know that clothes are 
vanity, but sometimes, on Sundays, I am seized 
with an extraordinary desire for velvets and 
feathers and furs. I feel that there must be a 
certain, spiritual tonic in the knowledge of being 



IN BELSHAZZAR COURT 13 

splendidly overdressed. It is a plunge into out- 
lawry which has its temptations to quiet people 
like myself who would never dare to put on a red 
tie. I sometimes wonder if the ancient Greeks, 
with all their inborn taste for simplicity in line 
and color, did not occasionally go in for a sar- 
torial spree. I really do not regret the fact that 
I cannot afford to give Emmeline a sealskin coat 
and a hat with aigrettes. Ninety-nine times out 
of a hundred I should feel uneasy to see her thus 
arrayed. But occasionally, yes, occasionally, I 
should like it. 

Frequently I catch myself wondering how the 
others can afford it. I take it that even when 
you make due allowance for the New York tem- 
perament it is fairly safe to assume that people 
living in the same apartment house occupy the 
same economic level. There are exceptions, of 
course. Tucked away in some rear-court apart- 
ment you will find people whose bank accounts 
would amaze their neighbors. But these are pre- 
cisely the ones who make the least display. They 
are maiden ladies of native American descent and 
the last of their line ; or the widows of Tammany 
contractors and office-holders who divide their 
time between works of piety and a cat ; or prolific 
German families of the second generation living 



14 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

after the sober traditions of the race. Still, I feel 
sure that the majority of our neighbors in Bel- 
shazzar Court are in the same income class with 
myself. How, then, can they afford it all — ^velvets, 
furs, the Sunday afternoon motor-car in front of 
the door? I put aside the obvious explanation, 
that there are no children. That would make 
a very considerable difference, but still — motor- 
cars, bridge three times a week for very consider- 
able stakes, tables reserved at Shanley's for Elec- 
tion night and New Year's Eve — 

" They have to afford it," says Emmeline, with 
that incisive justice of hers in which I should 
sometimes like to see a deeper tincture of mercy, 
" When you come to think of it, a little pink- 
nosed dog cannot fill up a woman's life. There 
must be other interests." 

" In other words," I said, " they can't afford it. 
Do these people pay their bills ? " 

We used to call this a rhetorical question at 
college. My information on the subject is prob- 
ably as good as Emmeline's. Five minutes of 
pleasant gossip with one's newsdealer is illuminat- 
ing. Not that I am given to hanging over shop- 
counters, or that my newsdealer would be reckless 
enough to mention names. But since we are by 
way of being in the same line of business, I writing 



IN BELSHAZZAR COURT 15 

for the newspapers while he sells them, — and in- 
cidentally makes the better income of the two, — 
we do pass the time of day whenever I drop in 
for cigars or stationery. On such occasions, 
without quoting names, he will state it as a regret- 
table economic puzzle that so many people who 
ride in motor-cars should find it hard to pay their 
newspaper bills. There was one account, running 
up to something over eight dollars, he told me, 
that he was finally compelled to write down to 
profit and loss. The figures are instructive. 
Eleven cents a week — for it is an odd fact that 
people who ride in motor-cars read only the penny 
papers — makes forty-four cents a month. Throw 
in an occasional ten-cent magazine and you have 
a total expenditure of say seventy or eighty cents 
a month. An unpaid newspaper bill of eight dol- 
lars would therefore argue a condition of acute 
financial embarrassment extending over a period 
of nearly a year. 

My newsdealer's explanation was that garage 
bills must be paid with fair promptness and din- 
ners at Shanley's must be paid for in cash, seeing 
that the demand is always greater than the sup- 
ply. Whereas the competition among newsdealers 
is so sharp, and literature is on the whole a luxury 
so easily dispensed with, that the news vendor 



16 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

must be content to wait for his bill or lose his 
customer. And he went on to say that there is 
serious talk among men in his line of business 
of organizing a newsdealers' benevolent and pro- 
tective association for the enforcement of collec- 
tions from customers living in elevator apart- 
ments. 

" And then again," says Emmeline, " why 
shouldn't they be able to afford it? They don't 
eat." 

She goes on to show that inevitably a house 
with no children in it is a house with very little 
good food in it. Emmeline has made a study of 
eugenics, and she has come to the conclusion that 
the purest milk and a lot of it, the juiciest steaks, 
and the freshest vegetables constitute the best 
preventive of a neurotic citizenship in the future. 
It is a principle which she lives up to so resolutely 
that our food bills would strike many people as 
staggering. Now appetite, Emmeline argues, is 
very susceptible to suggestion. People learn to 
eat by watching their young. It's like caviare. 
But where there are no children life may easily 
be sustained on soda crackers and a glass of millk. 

And it is something more than that. (I am 
still paraphrasing Emmeline's views.) A dining- 
room table with children's eager, hungry faces 



IN BELSHAZZAR COURT 17 

around it ceases to be a mere dining-room table 
and becomes an altar. Dinner is not a mere 
replenishing of the physiological furnaces ; it 
partakes of the nature of a sacrament, with the 
mother as the high priestess, and the father, — 
well, let us call him the tithe-gatherer. Eating in 
common is a form of primitive nature-worship 
which the purest religions have taken over and 
sanctified. To break bread together — well, all 
this is quite obvious. But now try to think of a 
sacrament as being administered with a can- 
opener and a chafing-dish. 

" That is what they live on," says Emmeline, 
" things that come out of tins and paper boxes. 
At the end of a year it means a fur coat." Which 
isn't really very convincing. A single after- 
theater supper on Broadway will easily swallow 
up a week's frying-pan economies. But as an 
index of the attitude of those women who cook 
for their children to those women who have no 
children to cook for, Emmeline's opinion has its 
value. I admit that, being a woman, she is 
prejudiced, my own prejudices being to a very 
great extent the reflection of hers. 

Emmeline has a hatred for gossip that is quite 
extraordinary in one who is so closely confined to 
her home by household duties. Hence you will 



18 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

wonder where she obtains her information, some- 
times so startlingly intimate, regarding our neigh- 
bors' habits. Well, in the first place, Belshazzar 
Court is very much like those Russian prisons you 
read about, which hum and echo with news flashing 
along mysterious channels. The prison walls re- 
sound to ghostly taps in the still of the night. 
The water-pipes beat out their message. A 
handkerchief is waved at a window. A convict's 
shackled feet, dragging along the corridor, send 
out the Morse code of the cell. So it requires no 
special gift of imagination to sit in one's apart- 
ment and reconstruct the main outlines of the life 
about you. The mechanical piano downstairs has 
its say. There is a scamper of young feet in the 
hallway above. A voice of exasperation rasps its 
way down the dumb-waiter. A sewing machine 
whirs its short half hour and is silent. Little 
yelping volleys announce meal-time for the silken- 
haired Pekinese. As night comes on, the lights 
begin to flash up, revealing momentary silhouettes, 
groups, bits of still life. The alarm clock in the 
morning and the heavy, thoughtful tread at mid- 
night bespeak different habits and occupations. 
It is a world built up out of sounds. 

There are the servants. They are the telegraph 
wires of apartment-house life. Like a good many 



IN BELSHAZZAR COURT 19 

telegraph wires in the great world outside, they 
are sadly overburdened with trivialities. Yet a 
healthy cook or nursemaid will pick up during a 
ten minutes' excursion to the roof an amazing 
mass of miscellaneous information. This infor- 
mation she insists upon imparting to you. At 
first Emmeline would refuse to listen, protesting 
that she did not care to be burdened with other 
people's affairs. But we soon learned that the one 
form of class-distinction which domestic help will 
not tolerate is a refusal to meet them on the 
common level of gossip. What makes the prob- 
lem all the more difficult is that as a rule the best 
servants have the keenest appetite for petty 
scandal. Presumably a robust interest in one's 
own duties goes hand in hand with a healthy inter- 
est in the way other people are living up to their 
duty. Elizabeth, the only cook we have ever 
had who will not create a scene when somebody 
drops in unexpectedly for dinner, simply oozes in- 
formation. When I think of the secrets into 
which Elizabeth has initiated us with regard to 
our neighbors whom we have never met, I feel 
an embarrassment which is only relieved by the 
thought that these neighbors must be quite as 
well informed about ourselves. 

Perhaps I should know more of our neighbors 



20 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

if the electric lights in our stately hallways did 
not burn so dimly. I have mentioned the hand- 
some glass chandeliers in our main hall and ves- 
tibule. Unfortunately they give forth a faint, 
sepulchral light. Our elevator car, a massive 
cage of iron and copper, is quite dark. It may 
be that our landlord has artistic leanings and is 
trying to impart a subdued, studio atmosphere 
to his halls ; very dim illumination being, I under- 
stand, the proper thing in advanced circles. In- 
cidentally there must be a saving in electricity 
bills. At any rate, if you will take into considera- 
tion the fact that I have a habit of staring at 
people, even in broad daylight, without recogniz- 
ing them, and if you will add to that the fact that 
a day's fussing over proofs and exchanges in the 
office is followed by an hour in the Subway over 
the evening papers, it is quite plain why I have 
difficulty in remembering the faces of neighbors 
whom I occasionally run across. 

Most of the neighbors are very much the same 
way. An hour in the dead atmosphere of the Sub- 
way wilts the social virtues out of a man. We 
manage to make our way listlessly into the upper 
air. We trudge wearily through the handsome 
iron doors of our apartment house. We take our 
places in opposite corners of the elevator car and 



IN BELSHAZZAR COURT 21 

stare up at the roof of the cage or count the floors 
as we pass. Three or four of us leave at the 
same floor and go our several ways, I to number 
43 on the right, one man to number 42 straight 
ahead, one to the left, and so forth. As I have 
said, there are nine apartments to the floor. 

Emmeline insists that I should not read in the 
Subway. She says I ought to lean back and close 
my eyes and rest. But she forgets that the man 
you lean back upon is sure to protest. Lateral 
pressure enforces an attitude of extreme rigidity 
during the rush hour, and to stand up straight 
with one's eyes closed tight is obviously ridiculous. 
Even when I find a seat, I do not like to close my 
eyes. It gives people the impression that I am 
pretending to be asleep in order to avoid giving 
up my seat to a woman, and on that subject I 
have the courage of my convictions. An hour in 
the Subway can be made endurable only by some 
such narcotic as the evening papers aff'ord; and 
when you have read through three or four papers, 
your eyes naturally show the strain. 

Of course, if we stay long enough in Belshazzar 
Court, we shall make acquaintances. Accident 
will bring that about. For instance, there are a 
number of men in my line of work and the allied 
professions who meet every now and then in a 



22 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

little German cafe on the East side in the 
'Eighties. It is not a club, since there are neither 
members nor by-laws nor initiation fees, nor, 
worst of all abominations, a set subject for papers 
and discussion. People simply drift in and out. 
We keep late hours, and it is a well-known fact 
that in the early hours of the morning friendships 
are rather easily formed. That was the way I 
met Brewster. 

Brewster (I don't know his first name) is a tall, 
thin, sallow-faced man of thirty-five who looks 
the Middle West he comes from. I had seen him 
at two of our meetings before we fell into talk. 
He spoke sparingly, not because he was shy, but 
because as a rule he had trouble in finding the 
right phrase. It was not until we were walking 
across town toward the Subway one night that I 
found out that Brewster is associate professor 
of mathematics at my old university. But he 
has ideas outside of Euclid. He is a Radical, he 
detests New York, and he is looking forward to 
the time when he can get away. But I imagine 
that he is not looking forward very eagerly. Your 
Radical loves the city while he curses it. At any 
rate, the Subway trains make speed at night and 
I was at my station before I knew it. Had he 
passed his own? No, it appeared that this was 



IN BELSHAZZAR COURT 23 

his station, too. That was pleasant, I said. Liv- 
ing in the same neighborhood I hoped we would 
see more of each other in the future. He said it 
would be pleasant indeed; his own address was 
Belshazzar Court. He had been there more than 
two years now. He lived on the third floor, in 47. 

" That would be directly across the court from 
43?" 

He thought it was. 

That was two weeks ago. We have not yet 
found the time to drop in on Brewster. But 
sometimes I catch a ghmpse of him through the 
window-curtains of his dining-room. Of course 
I had seen his figure pass across the window be- 
fore, but naturally had never looked long enough 
to fix his face in my memory. He has his two 
children and his unmarried sister in the apart- 
ment with him. The mother of the children is 
dead. The elder is a boy of seven, and I think 
he must be the pleasant-faced lad who on several 
occasions has rung our bell and complained that 
our Harold has robbed him of various bits of 
personal property — a toy pistol, a clay pipe, and 
several college emblems of the kind that come in 
cigarette boxes. 

That is all I know of Brewster directly. Em- 
meline knows a little more. She has it from our 



24 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

cook, who has it from Brewster's cook. He goes 
out very rarely. In the morning he escorts the 
little boy to a private school half a mile away. 
This he does on his way to the university. He 
comes home a little earlier than I do, usually with 
a grip full of books. Our cook says that Brewster 
is invariably present when his sister gives the little 
girl her bath before putting her to bed ; the child 
is only two years old. The boy has his supper 
with his father and aunt, and it is Brewster him- 
self who superintends his going to bed. This 
process is extremely involved and is marked by a 
great deal of rough-and-tumble hilarity. Late at 
night, as I sit reading or writing, I catch a glimpse 
of him over his work at the big dining-room table, 
correcting examination papers, I suppose, though 
I believe he does some actuarial work for an insur- 
ance company. He will get up occasionally for a 
turn or two about the room, or to fill his pipe, or 
to fetch from the kitchen a cup of tea which he 
drinks cold. I see him at work long after mid- 
night. 

Have I gone into all this detail concerning 
Brewster merely because he happens to live in 
47, which is just across the court from 43, or be- 
cause our habits and our interests really do touch 
at so many points? If Brewster w^ere writing 



IN BELSHAZZAR COURT 25 

down his impressions of Belshazzar Court at mid- 
night, with myself as the central figure, his story 
would be very much like mine. A glimpse into 
the windows of our dining-room would show me, 
too, in a clutter of papers, rustling through my 
exchange clippings, dipping into a volume of 
*' Pickwick " for a moment's rest, striking in- 
numerable matches to keep a reluctant pipe 
a-going, and drinking cold tea, — too much cold 
tea, I am afraid. 

Yes, Brewster and I have something in com- 
mon. But then I wonder, if I were living one 
floor above, in 53, and chance had made me ac- 
quainted with Smith who lives across the court in 
57, would Smith and I discover that there are 
human ties between us other than our dependence 
on the same central heating plant .'^ For one 
thing, I know that the Smiths have a baby which 
frequently cries at night in unison with our own. 
Sometimes the Smith baby wakes up ours. Some- 
times the initiative comes from our own side. 

Because I drink so much cold tea before going 
to bed, I find it difficult to fall asleep. I lie 
awake and think of Belshazzar Court with a fond- 
ness that I cannot muster at any other time. 
The house offers me an extraordinary sense of 
security ; not for myself, but for those who belong 



26 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

to me. It is a comfort to have one's wife and 
children snugly tucked away in one's own particu- 
lar cluster of cells at the end of one's own ob- 
scure little passageway, where an enemy would 
need Ariadne's guiding thread to find them. The 
cave man must have felt some such satisfaction 
when he had stored his young and their mother 
into some peculiarly inacessible rock cleft. 

I suppose the dark is a favorable time for the 
recurrence of such primordial feelings. In the 
dark the need for human fellowship wells up to 
the surface. Athwart the partitions of lath and 
mortar, we of Belshazzar Court experience the 
warm, protective sensation which comes from 
huddling together against the invisible menaces 
of the night. 

Decidedly, I must give up drinking so much cold 
tea. My eyes to-morrow will show the strain. 
But it is wonderful, too, this lying awake and 
feeling that you can almost catch the heart-throb 
of hundreds, above you, below you, on both sides. 
My neighbors undergo a magic transformation. 
Deprived of individuality, — viewed, so to speak, 
under their eternal aspect, — they grow lovable. 
Belshazzar's Court is transformed. In the day 
it is a barracks. At night it becomes a walled 
refuge, a tabernacle almost. The pulse of life 






'^'■*'%,.^-' 




Fifth Avenue below Fourteenth Street 



IN BELSHAZZAR COURT 27 

beats through its halls with just enough momen- 
tum to make a solemn music which gradually over- 
comes the effects of the cold tea. Intermittent 
noises twist themselves into vague fugues and 
arabesques. Somewhere on the floor above, heavy 
footsteps go back and forth in leisurely prepara- 
tion for bed. Somewhere across the court, people 
have returned from the theater. Evidently they 
are still under the exhilaration of the lights and 
the crowd. They pass judgment on the play and 
their voices are thoughtlessly fresh and animated, 
considering how late it is; but somehow you are 
not disturbed. With utter lack of interest you 
hear a child's wail break out — it is the Smith 
baby — and you hear the mother's " hush, hush," 
falling into a somnolent, crooning chant. Out- 
side, a motor-car starts into life with a grinding 
and a whir and a sputter, and you set yourself to 
follow its receding hum, which becomes a drone 
and then a murmur and then silence, but you are 
not sure whether it is yet silence. As you are 
still wondering there comes the end of things, 
except that now and then you stir to the clamor 
of the elevator bell, ringing indignantly for the 
boy who has run the car up to the top floor and 
gone to sleep in the hall. 



II 

THE STREET 

It is two short blocks from my office near Park 
Row to the Subway station where I take the ex- 
press for Belshazzar Court. Eight months in 
the year it is my endeavor to traverse this dis- 
stance as quickly as I can. This is done by cut- 
ting diagonally across the street traffic. By vir- 
tue of the law governing right-angled triangles I 
thus save as much as fifty feet and one-fifth of a 
minute of time. In the course of a year this sav- 
ing amounts to sixty minutes, which may be 
profitably spent over a two-reel presentation of 
" The Moonshiner's Bride," supplemented by an 
intimate picture of Lumbering in Saskatchewan. 

But with the coming of warm weather my 
habits change. It grows difficult to plunge into 
the murk of the Subway. A foretaste of June 
is in the air. The turnstile storm-doors in our of- 
fice building, which have been put aside for brief 
periods during the first deceptive approaches of 
spring, only to come back triumphant from Elba, 



THE STREET 29 

have been definitely removed. The steel-workers 
pace their girders twenty floors high almost in mid- 
season form, and their pneumatic hammers scold 
and chatter through the sultry hours. The soda 
fountains are bright with new compounds whose 
names ingeniously reflect the world's progress 
from day to day in politics, science, and the arts. 
From my window I can see the long black steam- 
ships pushing down to the sea, and they raise 
vague speculations in my mind about the cost of 
living in the vicinity of Sorrento and Fontaine- 
bleau. On such a day I am reminded of my 
physician's orders, issued last December, to walk 
a mile every afternoon on leaving my office. So I 
stroll up Broadway with the intention of taking 
my train farther uptown, at Fourteenth Street. 

The doctor did not say stroll. He said a brisk 
walk with head erect, chest thrown out, diaphragm 
well contracted, and a general aspect of money 
in the bank. But here enters human perversity. 
The only place where I am in the mood to walk 
after the prescribed military fashion is in the 
open country. Just where by all accounts I ought 
to be sauntering without heed to time, studying 
the lovely texts which Nature has set down in 
the modest type-forms selected from her inex- 
haustible fonts, — in the minion of ripening berries, 



so BELSHAZZAR COURT 

in the nonpareil of crawling insect life, the agate 
of tendril and filament, and the 12-point diamond 
of the dust, — there I stride along with my own 
thoughts and see little. 

And in the city, where I should swing along 
briskly, I lounge. What is there on Broadway 
to linger over? On Broadway, Nature has used 
her biggest, fattest type-forms. Tall, flat, build- 
ing fronts, brazen with many windows and ribbed 
with commercial gilt lettering six feet high; 
shrieking proclamations of auction sales written 
in letters of fire on vast canvasses ; railway posters 
in scarlet and blue and green; rotatory barber- 
poles striving at the national colors and producing 
vertigo; banners, escutcheons, crests, in all the 
primary colors — surely none of these things needs 
poring over. And I know them with my eyes 
closed. I know the windows where lithe youths in 
gymnasium dress demonstrate the virtue of home 
exercises ; the windows where other young men do 
nothing but put on and take off patent reversible 
near-linen collars ; where young women deftly roll 
cigarettes; where other young women whittle at 
sticks with miraculously stropped razors. I know 
these things by heart, yet I linger over them in 
flagrantly unhygienic attitudes, my shoulders bent 
forward and my chest and diaphragm in a posi- 



THE STREET 31 

tion precisely the reverse of that prescribed by 
the doctor. 

Perhaps the thing that makes me linger before 
these familiar sights is the odd circumstance that 
in Broadway's shop-windows Nature is almost 
S never herself, but is either supernatural or arti- 
ficial. Nature, for instance, never intended that 
razors should cut wood and remain sharp ; that 
linen collars should keep on getting cleaner the 
longer they are worn ; that glass should not 
break; that ink should not stain; that gauze 
should not tear; that an object worth five dollars 
should sell for $1.39 ; but all these things happen 
in Broadway windows. Williams, whom I meet 
now and then, who sometimes turns and walks up 
with me to Fourteenth Street, pointed out to me 
the other day how strange a thing it is that the 
one street which has become a synonym for " real 
life " to all good suburban Americans is not real 
at all, but is crowded either with miracles or with 
imitations. 

The windows on Broadway glow with wax 
fruits and with flowers of muslin and taffeta 
drawn by bounteous Nature from her storehouses 
in Parisian garret workshops. Broadway's ostrich 
feathers have been plucked in East side tenements. 
The huge cigars in the tobacconist's windows are 



32 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

of wood. The enormous bottles of champagne 
in the saloons are of cardboard, and empty. The 
tall scaffoldings of proprietary medicine bottles 
in the drug shops are of paper. " Why," said 
Williams, " even the jewelry sold in the Japanese 
auction stores is not genuine, and the auctioneers 
are not Japanese." 

This bustling mart of commerce, as the genera- 
tion after the Civil War used to say, is only a 
world of illusion. Artificial flowers, artificial 
fruits, artificial limbs, tobacco, rubber, silks, 
woolens, straws, gold, silver. The young men and 
women who manipulate razors and elastic cords are 
real, but not always. Williams and I once stood 
for a long while and gazed at a young woman pos- 
ing in a drug-shop window, and argued whether 
she was alive. Ultimately she winked and Wil- 
liams gloated over me. But how do I know her 
wink was real? At any rate, the great mass of 
human life in the windows is artificial. The ladies 
who smile out of charming morning costumes are 
obviously of lining and plaster. Their smug 
Herculean husbands in pajamas preserve their 
equanimity in the severest winter weather only 
because of their wire-and-plaster constitution. 
The baby reposing in its beribboned crib is china 
and excelsior. Illusion everywhere. 



THE STREET 33 

But the Broadway crowd is real. You only 
have to buffet it for five minutes to feel, in eyes 
and arms and shoulders, how real it is. When I 
was a boy and was taken to the circus it was 
always an amazing thing to me that there should 
be so many people in the street moving in a direc- 
tion away from the circus. Something of this 
sensation still besets me whenever we go down in 
the Subway from Belshazzar Court to hear Far- 
rar. The presence of all the other people on 
our train is simple enough. They are all on their 
way to hear Farrar. But what of the crowds in 
the trains that flash by in the opposite direction .^^ 
It is not a question of feeling sorry for them. I 
try to understand and I fail. But on Broadway 
on a late summer afternoon the obverse is true. 
The natural thing is that the living tide as it 
presses south shall beat me back, halt me, eddy 
around me. I know that there are people moving 
north with me, but I am not acutely aware of them. 
This onrush of faces converges on me alone. It 
is I against half the world. 

And then suddenly out of the surge of faces 
one leaps out at me. It is Williams, whose doctor 
has told him that the surest way of fighting down 
the lust for tobacco is to walk down from his office 
to the ferry every afternoon. Williams and I 



34 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

salute each other after the fashion of Broadway, 
which is to exchange greetings backward over the 
shoulder. This is the first step in an elaborate 
minuet. Because we have passed each other be- 
fore recognition came, our hands fly out backward. 
Now we whirl half around, so that I who have 
been moving north face the west, while Williams, 
who has been traveling south, now looks east. Our 
clasped hands strain at each other as we stand 
there poised for flight after the first greeting. A 
quarter of a minute perhaps, and we have said 
good-by. 

But if the critical quarter of a minute passes, 
there ensues a change of geographical position 
which corresponds to a change of soul within us. 
I suddenly say to myself that there are plenty of 
trains to be had at Fourteenth Street. Williams 
recalls that another boat will leave Battery Place 
shortly after the one he is bound for. So the 
tension of our outstretched arms relaxes. I, who 
have been facing west, complete the half circle and 
swing south. Williams veers due north, and we 
two men stand face to face. The beat and clamor 
of the crowd fall away from us like a well-trained 
stage mob. We are in Broadway, but not of it. 

" Well, what's the good word? " says Williams. 

When two men meet on Broadway the spirit of 



THE STREET 35 

optimism strikes fire. We begin by asking each 
other what the good word is. We take it for 
granted that neither of us has anything but a 
chronicle of victory and courage to relate. What 
other word but the good word is tolerable in the 
lexicon of living, upstanding men? Failure is 
only for the dead. Surrender is for the man with 
yellow in his nature. So Williams and I pay our 
acknowledgments to this best of possible worlds. 
I give Williams the good word. I make no allusion 
to the fact that I have spent a miserable night in 
communion with neuralgia ; how can that possibly 
concern him? Another manuscript came back this 
morning from an editor who regretted that his is 
the most unintelligent body of readers in the coun- 
try. The third cook in three weeks left us last 
night after making vigorous reflections on my 
wife's good nature and my own appearance. Only 
an hour ago, as I was watching the long, black 
steamers bound for Sorrento and Fontainebleau, 
the monotony of one's treadmill work, the flat un- 
profitableness of scribbling endlessly on sheets of 
paper, had become almost a nausea. But Wil- 
liams will know nothing of this from me. Why 
should he ? He may have been sitting up all night 
with a sick child. At this very moment the thought 
of the little parched lips, the moan, the unseeing 



36 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

eyes, may be tearing at his entrails ; but he in turn 
gives me the good word, and many others after 
that, and we pass on. 

But sometimes I doubt. This splendid optimism 
of people on Broadway, in the Subway, and in the 
shops and offices — is it really a sign of high spirit- 
ual courage, or is it just lack of sensibility? Do 
we find it easy to keep a stiff upper lip, to buck 
up, to never say die, because we are brave men, 
or simply because we lack the sensitiveness and 
the imagination to react to pain? It may be even 
worse than that. It may be part of our com- 
mercial gift for window-dressing, for putting up 
a good front. 

Sometimes I feel that Williams has no right to 
be walking down Broadway on business when there 
is a stricken child at home. The world cannot 
possibly need him at that moment as much as his 
own flesh and blood does. It is not courage ; it is 
brutish indifference. At such times I am tempted 
to dismiss as mythical all this fine talk about feel- 
ings that run deep beneath the surface, and 
bruised hearts that ache under the smile. If a 
man really suffers he will show it. If a man 
cultivates the habit of not showing emotion he 
will end by having none to show. How much of 
Broadway's optimism is — ^But here I am para- 



THE STREET 37 

phrasing William James's Principles of Fsy- 
chology, which the reader can just as well consult 
for himself in the latest revised edition of 1907. 
Also, I am exaggerating. Most likely Wil- 
liams's children are all in perfect health, and my 
envelope from the editor has brought a check in- 
stead of a rejection slip. It is on such occasions 
that Williams and I, after shaking hands the way 
a locomotive takes on water on the run, wheel 
around, halt, and proceed to buy something at the 
rate of two for a quarter. If anyone is ever in- 
clined to doubt the spirit of American fraternity, 
it is only necessary to recall the number of com- 
modities for men that sell two for twenty-five cents. 
In theory, the two cigars which Williams and I 
buy for twenty-five cents are worth fifteen cents 
apiece. As a matter of fact, they are probably 
ten-cent cigars. But the shopkeeper is welcome to 
his extra nickel. It is a small price to pay for the 
seal of comradeship that stamps his pair of cigars 
selling for a single quarter. Two men who have 
concluded a business deal in which each has com- 
mendably tried to get the better of the other may 
call for twenty-five cent perfectos or for half- 
dollar Dreadnoughts. I understand there are 
such. But friends sitting down together will al- 
ways demand cigars that go for a round sum, 



38 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

two for a quarter or three for fifty (if the editor's 
check is what it ought to be). 

When people speak of the want of real comrade- 
ship among women, I sometimes wonder if one of 
the reasons may not be that the prices which 
women are accustomed to pay are individualistic 
instead of fraternal. The soda fountains and the 
street cars do not dispense goods at the rate of 
two items for a single coin. It is infinitely worse 
in the department stores. Treating a friend to 
something that costs $2.79 is inconceivable. But 
I have really wandered from my point. 

" Well, be good," says Williams, and rushes off 
to catch his boat. 

The point I wish to make is that on Broadway 
people pay tribute to the principle of goodness 
that rules this world, both in the way they greet 
and in the way they part. We salute by asking 
each other what the good word is. When we say 
good-by we enjoin each other to be good. The 
humorous assumption is that gay devils like Wil- 
liams and me need to be constantly warned against 
straying off into the primrose paths that run out 
of Broadway. 

Simple, humorous, average American man! 
You have left your suburban couch in time to walk 
half a mile to the station and catch the 7.59 for 



THE STREET 39 

the city. You have read your morning paper ; dis- 
cussed the weather, the Kaiser, and the prospects 
for lettuce with your neighbor ; and made the office 
only a minute late. You have been fastened to 
your desk from nine o'clock to five, with half an 
hour for lunch, which you have eaten in a clamor- 
ous, overheated restaurant while you watched your 
hat and coat. At odd moments during the day 
the thought of doctor's bills, rent bills, school bills, 
has insisted on receiving attention. At the end 
of the day, laden with parcels from the market, 
from the hardware store, from the seedman, you 
are bound for the ferry to catch the 5.43, when 
you meet Smith, who, having passed the good word, 
sends you on your way with the injunction to be 
good — not to play roulette, not to open wine, not 
to turkey-trot, not to joy-ride, not to haunt the 
stage door. Be good, O simple, humorous, average 
suburban American ! 

I take back that word suburban. The Sunday 
Supplement has given it a meaning which is not 
mine. I am speaking only of the suburban in 
spirit, of a simplicity, a meekness which is of the 
soul only. Outwardly there is nothing suburban 
about the crowd on lower Broadway. The man 
in the street is not at all the diminutive, apologetic 
creature with side whiskers whom Mr. F. B. Opper 



40 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

brought forth and named Common People, who 
begat the Strap-Hanger, who begat the Rent- 
Payer and the Ultimate Consumer. The crowd on 
lower Broadway is alert and well set up. Yes, 
though one hates to do it, I must say " clean-cut." 
The men on the sidewalk are young, limber, sharp- 
faced, almost insolent young men. There are not 
very many old men in the crowd, though I see any 
number of gray-haired young men. Seldom do 
you detect the traditional signs of age, the sag- 
ging lines of the face, the relaxed abdominal con- 
tour, the tamed spirit. The young, the young-old, 
the old-young, but rarely quite the old. 

I am speaking only of externals. Clean-cut, 
eager faces are very frequently disappointing. A 
very ordinary mind may be working behind that 
clear sweep of brow and nose and chin. I have 
known the shock of young men who look like kings 
of Wall Street and speak like shoe clerks. They 
are shoe clerks. But the appearance is there, that 
athletic carriage which is helped out by our tri- 
umphant, ready-made clothing. I suppose I ought 
to detest the tailor's tricks which iron out all ages 
and all stations into a uniformity of padded 
shoulders and trim waist-lines and hips. I imagine 
I ought to despise our habit of wearing elegant 
shoddy where the European chooses honest. 



THE STREET 41 

clumsy woolens. But I am concerned only with 
externals, and in outward appearances a Broad- 
way crowd beats the world, ^sthetically we sim- 
ply are in a class by ourselves when compared 
with the Englishman and the Teuton in their 
skimpy, ill-cut garments. Let the British and 
German ambassadors at Washington do their 
worst. This is my firm belief and I will maintain 
it against the world. The truth must out. Ruat 
caelum. Ich kann nicht anders. J'y suis, yy reste. 

Williams laughs at my lyrical outbursts. But 
I am not yet through. I still have to speak of the 
women in the crowd. What an infinitely finer 
thing is a woman than a man of her class! To 
see this for yourself you have only to walk up 
Broadway until the southward-bearing stream 
breaks off and the tide begins to run from west to 
east. You have passed out of the commercial dis- 
trict into the region of factories. It is well on 
toward dark, and the barracks that go by the 
unlovely name of loft buildings, are pouring out 
their battalions of needle-workers. The crowd 
has become a mass. The nervous pace of lower 
Broadway slackens to the steady, patient tramp 
of a host. It is an army of women, with here and 
there a flying detachment of the male. 

On the faces of the men the day's toil has writ- 



42 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

ten its record even as on the woman, but in a 
much coarser hand. Fatigue has beaten down the 
soul of these men into brutish indifference. But in 
the women it has drawn fine the flesh only to make 
it more eloquent of the soul. Instead of listless- 
ness, there is wistfulness. Instead of vacuity you 
read mystery. Innate grace rises above the vul- 
garity of the dress. Cheap, tawdry blouse and 
imitation willow-plume walk shoulder to shoulder 
with the shoddy coat of the male, copying Fifth 
Avenue as fifty cents may attain to five dollars. 
But the men's shoddy is merely a horror, whereas 
woman transfigures and subtilizes the cheap mate- 
rial. The spirit of grace which is the birthright 
of her sex cannot be killed — not even by the pres- 
ence of her best young man in Sunday clothes. 
She is finer by the heritage of her sex, and America 
has accentuated her title. This America which 
drains her youthful vigor with overwork, which 
takes from her cheeks the color she has brought 
from her Slavic or Italian peasant home, makes 
restitution by remolding her in more delicate, 
more alluring lines, gives her the high privilege 
of charm — ^and neurosis. 

Williams and I pause at the Subway entrances 
and watch the earth suck in the crowd. It lets 
itself be swallowed up with meek good nature. 



THE STREET 43 

Our amazing good nature ! Political philosophers 
have deplored the fact. They have urged us to 
be quicker-tempered, more resentful of being 
stepped upon, more inclined to write letters to the 
editor. I agree that only in that way can we be 
rid of political bosses, of brutal policemen, of 
ticket-speculators, of taxicab extortioners, of 
insolent waiters, of janitors, of indecent conges- 
tion in travel, of unheated cars in the winter and 
barred-up windows in summer. I am at heart with 
the social philosophers. But then I am not typical 
of the crowd. When my neighbor's elbow injects 
itself into the small of my back, I twist around 
and glower at him. I forget that his elbow is the 
innocent mechanical result of a whole series of 
elbows and backs extending the length of the car, 
to where the first cause operates in the form of a 
station-guard's shoulder ramming the human cat- 
tle into their stalls. In the faces about me there 
is no resentment. Instead of smashing windows, 
instead of raising barricades in the Subway and 
hanging the train-guards with their own lanterns 
about their necks, the crowd sways and bends to 
the lurching of the train, and young voices call 
out cheerfully, " Plenty of room ahead." 

Horribly good-natured! We have taken a 
phrase which is the badge of our shame and turned 



44 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

it into a jest. Plenty of room ahead! If this 
were a squat, ill-formed proletarian race obviously 
predestined to subjection, one might understand. 
But that a crowd of trim, well-cut, self-reliant 
Americans, sharp-featured, alert, insolent as I 
have called them, that they should submit is a 
puzzle. Perhaps it is because of the fierce democ- 
racy of it all. The crush, the enforced intimacies 
of physical contact, the feeling that a man's 
natural condition is to push and be pushed, to 
shove ahead when the opportunity offers and to 
take it like a man when no chance presents itself 
— that is equality. A seat in the Subway is like 
the prizes of life for which men have fought in 
these United States. You struggle, you win or 
lose. If the other man wins there is no envy ; ad- 
miration rather, provided he has not shouldered 
and elbowed out of reason. That god-like freedom 
from envy is passing to-day, and perhaps the good 
nature of the crowd in the Subway will pass. I 
see signs of the approaching change. People do 
not call out, " Plenty of room ahead," so fre- 
quently as they used to. 

Good-natured when dangling from the strap in 
the Subway, good-natured in front of baseball 
bulletins on Park Row, good-natured in the face of 
so much oppression and injustice, where is the 



THE STREET 45 

supposed cruelty of the " mob " ? I am ready to 
affirm on oath that the mob is not vindictive, that 
it is not cruel. It may be a bit sharp-tongued, 
fickle, a bit mischievous, but in the heart of the 
crowd there is no evil passion. The evil comes 
from the leaders, the demagogues, the professional 
distorters of right thinking and right feeling. 
The crowd in the bleachers is not the clamorous, 
brute mob of tradition. I have watched faces in 
the bleachers and in the grand-stand and seen little 
of that fury which is supposed to animate the fan. 
For the most part he sits there with folded arms, 
thin-lipped, eager, but after all conscious that 
there are other things in life besides baseball. No, 
it is the leaders, the baseball editors, the cartoon- 
ists, the humorists, the professional stimulators of 
" local pride," with their exaggerated gloatings 
over a game won, their poisonous attacks upon a 
losing team, who are responsible. It is these 
demagogues who drill the crowd in the gospel of 
loving only a winner — but if I keep on I shall be 
in politics before I know it. 

If you see in the homeward crowd in the Sub- 
way a face over which the pall of depression has 
settled, that face very likely is bent over the comic 
pictures in the evening paper. I cannot recall 
seeing anyone smile over these long serials of 



46 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

humorous adventure which run from day to day 
and from year to year. I have seen readers turn 
mechanically to these lurid comics and pore over 
them, foreheads puckered into a frown, lips un- 
consciously spelling out the long legends which 
issue in the form of little balloons and lozenges 
from that amazing portrait gallery of dwarfs, 
giants, shrilling viragos and their diminutive hus- 
bands, devil-children, quadrupeds, insects, — an 
entire zoology. If any stimulus rises from these 
pages to the puzzled brain, the effect is not visible. 
I imagine that by dint of repetition through the 
years these grotesque creations have become a 
reality to millions of readers. It is no longer a 
question of humor, it is a vice. The Desperate 
Desmonds, the Newly-weds, and the Dingbats, 
have acquired a horrible fascination. Otherwise 
I cannot see why readers of the funny page should 
appear to be memorizing pages from Euclid. 

This by way of anticipation. What the doctor 
has said of exercise being a habit which grows 
easy with time is true. It is the first five minutes 
of walking that are wearisome. I find myself 
strolling past Fourteenth Street, where I was to 
take my train for Belshazzar Court. Never mind, 
Forty-Second Street will do as well. I am now 
on a different Broadway, The crowd is no longef 



THE STREET 47 

north and south, but flows in every direction. It 
is churned up at every corner and spreads itself 
across the squares and open places. Its appear- 
ance has changed. It is no longer a factory popu- 
lation. Women still predominate, but they are 
the women of the professions and trades which 
center about Madison Square — ^business women of 
independent standing, women from the magazine 
offices, the publishing houses, the insurance offices. 
You detect the bachelor girl in the current which 
sets in toward the home quarters of the undomes- 
ticated, the little Bohemias, the foreign eating- 
places whose fixed table d'hote prices flash out in 
illumined signs from the side streets. Still farther 
north and the crowd becomes tinged with the cur- 
rent of that Broadway which the outside world 
knows best. The idlers begin to mingle with the 
workers, men appear in English clothes with canes, 
women desperately corseted with plumes and 
jeweled reticules. You catch the first heart-beat 
of Little Old New York. 

The first stirrings of this gayer Broadway die 
down as quickly almost as they manifested them- 
selves. The idlers and those who minister to them 
have heard the call of the dinner hour and have 
vanished, into hotel doors, into shabbier quarters 
by no means in keeping with the cut of their gar- 



48 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

merits and their apparent indifference to useful 
employment. Soon the street is almost empty. It 
is not a beautiful Broadway in this garish interval 
between the last of the matinee and shopping 
crowd and the vanguard of the night crowd. The 
monster electric sign-boards have not begun to 
gleam and flash and revolve and confound the eye 
and the senses. At night the electric Niagara 
hides the squalid fronts of ugly brick, the dark 
doorways, the clutter of fire-escapes, the rickety 
w^ooden hoardings. Not an imperial street this 
Broadway at 6.30 of a summer's afternoon. 
Cheap jewelry shops, cheap tobacconist's shops, 
cheap haberdasheries, cheap restaurants, grimy 
little newspaper agencies and ticket-offices, and 
" demonstration " stores for patent foods, patent 
waters, patent razors. . . . 

O Gay White Way, you are far from gay in the 
fast fading light, before the magic hand of Edison 
wipes the wrinkles from your face and galvanizes 
you into hectic vitality; far from alluring with 
your tinsel shop-windows, with your pufFy-faced, 
unshaven men leaning against door-posts and 
chewing pessimistic toothpicks, your sharp-eyed 
newsboys wise with the wisdom of the Tenderloin, 
and your itinerant women whose eyes flash from 
side to side. It is not in this guise that you draw 



THE STREET 49 

the hearts of millions to yourself, O dingy, Gay 
White Way, O Via Lobsteria Dolorosa ! 

Well, when a man begins to moralize it is time 
to go home. I have walked farther than I in- 
tended, and I am soft from lack of exercise, and 
tired. The romance of the crowd has disap- 
peared. Romance cannot survive that short pas- 
sage of Longacre Square, where the art of the 
theater and of the picture-postcard flourish in an 
atmosphere impregnated with gasoline. As I 
glance into the windows of the automobile sales- 
rooms and catch my own reflection in the enamel 
of Babylonian limousines I find myself thinking all 
at once of the children at home. They expand 
and fill up the horizon. Broadway disappears. 
I smile into the face of a painted promenader, 
but how is she to know that it is not at her I 
smile but at the sudden recollection of what the 
baby said at the breakfast-table that morning.? 
Like all good New Yorkers when they enter the 
Subway, I proceed to choke up all my senses 
against contact with the external world, and thus 
resolving myself into a state of coma, I dip down 
into the bowels of the earth, whence in due time 
I am spewed out two short blocks from Belshazzar 
Court. 



m 

THE SHOW 

Feom Belshazzar Court to the theater district 
is only a thirty minutes' ride in the Subway, but 
usually we reach the theater a few minutes after 
the rise of the curtain. Why this should be I have 
never been able to explain. It is a fact that on 
such nights we have dinner half an hour early, and 
Emmeline comes to the table quite ready to go out 
except that she has her cloak to slip on. Never- 
theless we are a few minutes late. While Emme- 
line is slipping on her cloak I glance through 
the editorial page in the evening paper, answer 
the telephone, and recall several bits of work I 
overlooked at the office. I then give Harold a 
drink of water in bed, help Emmeline with her hat, 
clean out the drawers in my writing-table, tell 
Harold to stop talking to himself and go to sleep, 
and hunt for the theater tickets in the pockets of 
my street clothes. After that I have time to read 
a pag« or two of John Galsworthy and go in to 
see that Harold is well covered up. Emmeline 

50 



THE SHOW 51 

always makes me save time by having me ring for 
the elevator while she is drawing on her gloves. 
Nevertheless we are a few minutes late for the first 
act. 

But if I frequently leave Belshazzar Court in a 
state of mild irritation, my spirits rise the moment 
we enter the Subway. I am stirred by the lights 
and the crowd, this vibrant New York crowd of 
which I have spoken before, so aggressively youth- 
ful, so prosperous, so strikingly overdressed, and 
carrying off its finery with a dash that is quite 
remarkable considering that we are only a half- 
way-up middle-class crowd jammed together in a 
public conveyance. Since our trip abroad some 
years ago I am convinced that the Parisian woman 
needs all the chic and esprit she can encompass. 
I will affirm that in half an hour in the Subway, 
at any time of day, I see more charming faces than 
we saw during six weeks in Paris. I have hitherto 
been timid about expressing this opinion in print, 
but only the other night I sat up to read Inno- 
cents Abroad after many years. What Mark 
Twain has to say of the Parisian grisette encour- 
ages me to make this confession of faith. As I 
swing from my strap and scan the happy, well-to- 
do faces under the glow of the electric lamps, I 
sometimes find myself wondering what reason 



52 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

William D. Haywood can possibly have for being 
dissatisfied with things as they are. 

We are usually late at the theater, but not al- 
ways. There are times when Harold will get 
through with his dinner without being once called 
to order. He then announces that he is tired and 
is anxious to get into bed. On such occasions 
Emmeline grows exceedingly nervous. She feels 
his head and makes him open his mouth and say, 
" Aaa-h-h," so that she may look down his throat. 
If Harold carries out his promise and does 
promptly go to sleep, it intensifies our anxiety and 
threatens to spoil our evening; but it does also 
save a little time. It brings us to the theater a 
minute or two before the curtain goes up, and 
gives us a chance to study the interior decorations 
of the auditorium, completed at great cost, the 
exact amount of which I cannot recall without 
my evening paper. If you will remember that we 
go to the theater perhaps a dozen times during 
the season, and that the number of new theaters 
on Broadway every season is about that number, 
you will see why very frequently we should be 
finding ourselves in a new house. 

It is a matter of regret to me that I cannot 
grow enthusiastic over theatrical interiors. I do 
my best, but the novel arrangement of proscenium 



THE SHOW 53 

boxes and the upholstery scheme leave me cold. I 
recall what the evening paper said of the new 
Blackfriars. Its architecture is a modification of 
the Parthenon at Athens, and it is nine stories 
high and equipped with business offices and bache- 
lor quarters. It was erected as one of a chain 
of amusement houses stretching clear across to 
San Francisco, by a manager who began three 
years ago as a moving-picture impresario in the 
Bronx. Having made a hit in the " legitimate " 
with an unknown actress in a play by an unknown 
writer, he immediately signed a contract with the 
playwright for his next six plays, hired six com- 
panies for the road, and built a chain of theaters 
to house the plays. This is the American of it. 
If three years from now this Napoleon of Long- 
acre Square is back at his five-cent moving-picture 
place in the Bronx it will also be the American 
of it. When I tell Emmeline that the ceiling has 
been copied from a French chateau, she looks up 
and says nothing. 

The curtain goes up on the famous ten-thou- 
sand-dollar drawing-room set which has been the 
hit of the season. The telephone on the real Louis 
XVI table rings, the English butler comes in to 
answer the call, and the play is on. The ex- 
traordinary development of the telephone on the 



54. BELSHAZZAR COURT 

New York stage is possibly our most notable and 
meritorious contribution to contemporary dra- 
matic art. The telephone serves a far higher 
purpose than Sardou's parlor-maid with the 
feather-duster. It is plain, of course, that the 
dramatist's first purpose is to sound a universal 
human note. And the telephone is something which 
comes very close to every one of us. If the Eng- 
lish butler, instead of answering a telephone call, 
picks up the instrument and himself calls for some 
familiar number, like 3100 Spring, which is Police 
Headquarters, you can actually perceive the re- 
sponsive thrill which sweeps the house. The note 
of universal humanity has been struck. 

This point is worth keeping in mind. If I am 
somewhat insistent on being in time for the be- 
ginning of the play, it is because I want to subject 
myself to the magic touch of the telephone bell, 
and not because I am afraid of missing the drift 
of the playwright's story. Of that there is no 
danger, because I know the story already. I don't 
know whether college courses in the drama still 
spend as much time as they used to fifteen years 
ago in laying emphasis on the fact that the first 
act of a play is devoted to exposition. If college 
courses are really as modem as they are said to 
be, professors of the drama will now be teaching 



THE SHOW 55 

their students that the playwright's real prepara- 
tion for his conflict and his climax is not to be 
found in the first act at all, but several weeks be- 
fore the play is produced, in the columns of the 
daily press. 

If Goethe were writing Faust to-day he would 
not lay his Prologue in Heaven but in the news- 
papers. I know what I am about to see and hear, 
because I have read all the newspaper chatter 
while the play was in incubation and in rehearsal. 
I have been taken into confidence by the managers 
just before they sailed for Europe in the bridal 
suite of the Oli/mpic. If they omitted anything, 
they have cabled it over from Paris at enormous 
expense. Through interviews with stars and lead- 
ing ladies, through calculated indiscretions on the 
part of the box-office with regard to advance sales, 
through the newspaper reviews after the first 
night, I am educated up to the act of seeing a 
play with a thoroughness that the post-graduate 
department of Johns Hopkins might envy. 

Consequently, there is not the slightest danger, 
even if we come late, that I shall laugh in the 
wrong place or fail to laugh in the right place, or 
that Emmeline will fail to grope for her handker- 
chief at the right time. Through the same agency 
of the newspaper the funniest lines, the strongest 



56 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

" punch," the most sympathetic bits of dialogue 
have been located and charted. At college I used 
to be told that the tremendous appeal of the Greek 
drama was dependent in large measure on the fact 
that it dealt with stories which were perfectly 
familiar to the public. The Athenian audience 
came to the theater expectant, surcharged with 
emotion, waiting eagerly for the proper cue to 
let its feelings go. But Athens was not con- 
ceivably better worked up than New York is to- 
day when it goes to the theater. 

Even James M. Barrie does it. I remember 
when Emmeline and I went to see Barrie's What 
Every Woman Knows, some years ago. What we 
really went for, like ten thousand other good peo- 
ple of New York, was to hear the much-advertised 
tag with which Barrie ended his play, to the effect, 
namely, that woman was not made out of man's 
rib but out of his funny bone. I do not recall 
that a single dramatic reviewer in New York after 
the first night omitted to concentrate on that 
epigram ; if he did he must have been called down 
severely by the managing editor. Now it is my 
sincere belief that the Barrie joke is a poor one. 
It is offensively smart, it has the " punch " which 
it is Barrie's merit to omit so regularly from his 
plays. It is inferior to any number of delightful 



THE SHOW 57 

lines in that really beautiful play. That is, I say 
so now when I am in my right senses. But when 
Emmeline and I, under the hypnotic spell of the 
newspapers, went to see What Every Woman 
Knows, what was it that we waited for through 
four longish acts, — what but that unhappy quip 
which everybody else was waiting for? Of course 
we laughed and applauded. We laughed in the 
same shamefaced and dutiful spirit in which 
people stand up in restaurants when the band 
plays the " Star-Spangled Banner." Often I 
wonder what would Shakespeare and Moliere not 
have accomplished if they had had the newspapers 
to hypnotize the audience for them instead of be- 
ing compelled to do so themselves. 

Hypnotism everywhere. One of the popular 
plays that we never went to see was recommended 
to Emmeline by a very charming woman who said 
it was a play which every woman ought to take 
her husband to see. In itself that is as admirable 
a bit of dramatic criticism as could be distilled out 
of several columns of single-leaded minion. But 
the trouble was that this charming woman had not 
thought it out for herself. She had found the 
phrase in the advertising notices of this play. It 
was so pat, so quotable, and the press agent was 
so evidently sincere in using it, that it seemed a 



58 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

pity not to pass it on to others. After half a 
dozen friends had recommended the play to Em- 
meline as a good one for me to be taken to, she 
rebelled and said she would not go. She was in- 
tellectually offended. Her ostensible reason was 
that she doubted whether the play would do me 
any good. I had my revenge not long after when 
I offered to take her to a play which dealt with 
woman's extravagance in dress, and which the ad- 
vertisements said every man ought to take his wife 
to see. Emmeline said that my sense of humor 
often betrays me. 

This, I am sorry to say, happens rather fre- 
quently. My feeble jest about the play which all 
wives ought to be taken to see was devised on the 
spur of the moment. But there is one sly bit of 
humor which I regularly employ and which I never 
fail to regret. This happens whenever, in reply 
to Emmeline's suggestion that we take in one of 
the new plays, I say with malice aforethought that 
the piece is one to which a man would hardly care 
to take his wife. The response is instantaneous. 
It makes no difference that our views on this sub- 
ject are identical. Apostrophizing me as an ex- 
emplar of that muddle-headed thing which is inter- 
changeably known as fossilized Puritanism and 
Anglo-Saxon hypocrisy, Emmeline begins by ask- 



THE SHOW 59 

ing whether a play that is not fit for a man's 
wife to see is fit for the husband of that wife. 
Since I agree with her, the question remains un- 
answerable. She then goes on to ask whether it 
might not be an excellent thing for the theater to 
abolish the distinction between plays that a man's 
wife can see and those she cannot see, and to make 
it a law, preferably a Federal law based on social 
justice, that no man shall be allowed to enter a 
theater without a woman companion. 

It is a sore point with her. We had as guest 
at dinner one night an estimable young man who 
told us that, being anxious to take his betrothed to 
a certain play, he had bought a ticket for the 
family circle the night before, to see whether the 
play was a fit one for the young woman to be taken 
to. Emmeline cast one baleful glance at the young 
man, which he fortunately failed to catch, his 
head being bent over the asparagus. But she has 
never asked him to call again. To me, afterward, 
she scarified the poor young man. 

" Imagine," she said. " Here is a man in love 
with a woman. He is about to take her, and give 
himself to her, for better and for worse. He asks 
her to face the secrets of life and the fear of death 
with him. But he is afraid to take her to the 
theater with him." 



60 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

The joy of combat makes me forget that my 
views are quite the same. 

" It shows his thoughtfulness," I said. " There 
are any number of nasty plays in town." 

"Why are they here?" she asked. 

" I'm sure I don't know." 

" I'll tell you why," she said : " to meet the de- 
mand for plays that a man cannot take his wife 
to." 

I assured her that this common phrase really 
did not mean all she read into it. The average 
citizen, I said, does not look upon his wife as a 
tender plant to be shielded against the breath of 
harm. It was only another instance of our falling 
in with a phrase, and repeating it in parrot 
fashion, until we are surprised to find ourselves 
living up to it. But Emmeline said it was Anglo- 
Saxon hypocrisy superimposed on the universal 
Sklavenmoral from which woman suffers. At this 
point I am convinced that a sense of humor often 
does betray one. 

Steeped in the sincere, if often ferociously 
sincere, realism of the Russian writers, it is plain 
why one should revolt against the catch-phrases 
which make up so large a part of our speech and 
thought. Because she knows the realism of 
European literature, Emmeline grows angry with 



THE SHOW 61 

the stage manager's realism in which we have made 
such notable progress of late. She has refused to 
be impressed by Mr. Belasco's marvelous repro- 
duction of a cheap restaurant, in which the tiled 
walls, the coffee-urns, the cash-registers, and the 
coat-racks were so unmistakably actual as to 
make a good many of us forget that the action 
which takes place in this restaurant might just as 
well have taken place in the Aquarium or on top 
of the Jungfrau. There was another play. For 
weeks, the author, the producer, and several as- 
sistants (I am now quoting press authority) had 
been searching the city for the exact model of a 
hall bedroom in a theatrical boarding-house such 
as the playwright had in mind. They found what 
they were looking for. When the curtain rose on 
the opening night, the public, duly kept informed 
as to the progress of the quest, naturally rose 
with enthusiasm to the perfect picture of a mean 
chamber in a squalid boarding-house. The scene 
was appalling in its detail of tawdry poverty. 
Except for the fact that the bedroom was about 
sixty feet long, forty feet wide, and fifty feet high, 
the effect of destitution was startling. 

But there is a more dangerous realism. Our 
stage has progressed beyond this actuality of real 
doors with real door-knobs. We have attained as 



62 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

far as the external realism of human types. As 
exhibited on the stage to-day, the shop-girls, the 
" crooks," the detectives, the clerks, the traveling 
salesmen, the shady financiers, are startlingly true 
to life in appearance, in walk, in speech. For that 
one ought presumably to be thankful. Pre- 
sumably it is progress to have shop-girls, clerks, 
financiers, " crooks," and their pursuers, instead 
of Pinero's drawing-room heroines and bounders, 
or Henry Bernstein's highly galvanized boule- 
vardiers. If people with the look of Broadway, 
with the tang and speech of Broadway, walk the 
boards, what more would one have? 

" Soul," says Emmeline, and she lashes out at 
the beautifully made puppets on the stage. Ex- 
ternal realism has gone as far as it may, but be- 
neath the surface everything is false. The life of 
these amazingly lifelike figures is false, the story 
is false, the morals and the conclusions are false. 
At bottom it is tawdry melodrama. New tricks of 
the trade have been mastered, but the same crude, 
childish views of life confront us, and the same 
utter lack of that form which is the joy of art. 
The American stage never had an excess of form. 
We have less now than we ever had. 

As I think back over the last few paragraphs I 
find that I may have given an utterly wrong im- 



THE SHOW 63 

pression of how the theater affects Emmeline and 
me. It would be deplorable if the reader should 
get to think that we are high-brows. It is quite 
the other way. Between the acts and at home, 
the two of us may be tremendously critical, but 
while the business of the stage is under way we 
are grateful for the least excuse to yield ourselves 
to the spirit of the thing. Provided, only, there 
is nothing in the play about a young woman who 
beards a king of finance and frightens him into 
surrendering a million dollars' worth of bonds. 
Financiers and their female private secretaries I 
cannot abide. Otherwise, I delight in nearly 
everything: in The Old Homestead^ in George M. 
Cohan, in Fanny's First Flay, and in the farce- 
comedies where a recreant husband, surprised by 
his wife, steps backward into his own suit-case. 
Emmeline confesses that she has seldom seen a 
proposal of marriage on the stage without want- 
ing to sniffle sympathetically. 

Because I take pleasure in seeing frivolous 
young men step into their own suit-cases I am not 
averse to musical comedy. Emmeline rarely ac- 
companies me ; not because she is afraid that it is 
the kind of a play a man should not take his wife 
to, but because it does not interest her. She is 
fond of Gilbert and Sullivan, and she likes The 



64 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

Chocolate Soldier; but of our own native musical 
comedy I think she has seen only one example. 

The play was called The Girl from Grand 
Rapids, The principal characters are an Ameri- 
can millionaire and his daughter who are traveling 
in Switzerland. They come to the little village of 
Sprudelsaltz and are mistaken by the populace 
for the German Kaiser and his Chancellor who 
are expected on a secret mission. The American 
millionaire, in order to outwit a business rival who 
belongs to the Furniture Trust, consents to play 
the part. He accounts for the apparent sex of 
his Chancellor by declaring that the evil designs 
of certain French spies have made it necessary for 
his companion to assume this peculiar disguise. 
The Chancellor falls in love with the young 
British attache, who has come to Switzerland 
for the purpose of unearthing certain important 
secrets relative to the German navy. At their 
first meeting the supposed German Chancellor and 
the British naval attache sing a duet of which the 
refrain is, " Oh, take me back to Bryant Square." 
Ultimately the identity of the pseudo Kaiser and 
his Chancellor is discovered. They are threatened 
by the infuriated Swiss populace in fur jackets 
and tights, and are saved only through the inter- 
vention of a comic Irish waiter named Gansen- 



THE SHOW 65 

Schmidt. They escape from Switzerland and in 
the second act we find them at Etah, in Green- 
land, where the millionaire's daughter is compelled 
to wed an Eskimo chieftain who turns out to be 
the British naval attache in disguise. The third 
act shows an Arab carnival in the Sahara. Re- 
peatedly, in the course of the evening, Emmeline 
asked me why I laughed. 

There is also a business motive in my playgoing. 
I am learning how to build a complicated dramatic 
plot. Years ago I set out to write a play. Like 
all people of slipshod habits I have sudden at- 
tacks of acute systematization, and when I began 
my play, I assigned so much time for working 
out the plot, so much for character-development, 
so much for actually writing the dialogue. The 
scheme did not quite work out. I forget the de- 
tails ; the point is that at the end of a year I had 
written all my dialogue, but had made little prog- 
ress with my character-development and had done 
nothing whatever on my plot. Since that time I 
have moved ahead. My characters are to me 
fairly alive now. But I still have a plot and inci- 
dents to find for my play. Emmeline says that 
my quest is a vain one. She is convinced that I 
have no gift for dramatic complication, and that 
the best I can hope for is to do something like 



66 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

Bernard Shaw. But I refuse to give in. I go 
to see how other men have done the trick, and 
some day, who knows, I may yet find a skele- 
ton on which to hang my polished and spirited 
dialogue. 

Between the acts there are two things which one 
naturally does. I read in the programme what 
men will wear during the winter, and I scan faces, 
a habit which I find growing upon me in all sorts 
of public places and which will some day bring me 
into serious trouble. People are rather stolid be- 
tween the acts. It is a very rare play in which 
the sense of illusion carries over from one act to 
the next and is reflected in the faces of the spec- 
tators. The perfect play, as I conceive it, should 
keep the audience in a single mood from be- 
ginning to end. Between the fall and the rise of 
the curtain the spell ought to hold and show itself 
in a flushed, bright-eyed gayety, in a feverish 
chatter which should carry on the playwright's 
message until he resumes the business of his nar- 
rative. But as a rule I am not exalted between 
the acts, and I perceive that my neighbors are not. 
It is not a play we are watching, but three or four 
separate plays. When the curtain descends we 
lean back into an ordinary world. The business 
of the stage drops from us. We resume conversa- 



THE SHOW 67 

tion interrupted in the Subway. A young woman 
on the left furnishes her companion with details 
of last night's dance. Two young men in front 
argue over the cost of staging the piece. One 
says it cost $10,000, and the other says $15,000, 
and they pull out their favorite evening papers 
from under the seat and quote them to each other. 
Emmeline wonders whether she looked down far 
enough into Harold's throat when he said, 
« Aaa-h-h." 

It is not entirely our own fault if we lose the 
sense of continuous illusion between the acts. 
There is little in the ordinary play to carry one 
forward from one act to the next. We still talk 
of suspense and movement and climax, whereas 
our plays are not organic plays at all, but mere 
vaudeville. They do not depend for their effect 
on cumulative interest, but on the individual 
" punch." Drama, -melodrama, comedy, and farce 
have their own laws. But our latest dramatic 
form combines all forms in a swift medley of ef- 
fects that I can describe by no other term than 
vaudeville. George M. Cohan is our representa- 
tive dramatist, not because he has flung the star- 
spangled banner to the breeze, but because he has 
cast all consistency to the winds. Who ever heard 
of a melodramatic farce? Mr. Cohan is writing 



68 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

them all the time. They are plays in which peo- 
ple threaten each other with automatic pistols to 
the accompaniment of remarks which elicit roars 
of laughter. 

I know, of course, that Shakespeare has a 
drunken porter on the stage while Macbeth is do- 
ing Duncan to death. But George M. Cohan is 
different. I have in mind a homeless little village 
heroine of Mr. Cohan's who is about to board a 
train for the great city with its pitfalls and pri- 
vations. Emmeline was quite affected by the 
pathetic little figure on the platform, with the 
shabby suit-case — until six chorus men in beauti- 
fully creased trousers waltzed out on the train 
platform and did a clog-dance and sang, " Good- 
by, Mary, don't forget to come back home." I 
can't conceive Shakespeare doing this sort of 
thing. It is gripping while it lasts, but when the 
curtain falls, one chiefly thinks how late it will be 
before one gets home. 

But if the playwright's story does not always 
hold me, the people on the stage seldom fail to 
bring me under the spell. I am not a professional 
critic and I have no standards of histrionic skill 
to apply. It may be, as people say, that our 
actors are deficient in imagination, in the power 
of emotional utterance, in facial eloquence, in 



THE SHOW 69 

the art of creating illusion. Perhaps it is true 
that they seldom get into the skin of their charac- 
ters, and never are anything but themselves. But 
precisely because they are themselves I like them. 
I like their lithe, clean-cut length, their strong, 
clean-shaven faces, their faultless clothes. I like 
the frequency with which they change from morn- 
ing to evening dress. I like the ease with which 
they order taxicabs, press buttons for the club 
waiter, send out cablegrams to Shanghai, and 
make appointments to meet at expensive road- 
houses which are reached only by automobile. 
The nonchalance with which George M. Cohan's 
people distribute large sums is a quickening 
spectacle to me. 

After this it will be difficult for anyone to ac- 
cuse me of being a high-brow. Let me dispose 
of this matter beyond all doubt. I do not under- 
stand what people mean when they speak of in- 
tellectual actors and the intellectual interpreta- 
tion of stage roles. Possibly it is a defective 
imagination in me which makes me insist that 
actors shall look their part physically. Not all 
the imaginative genius in the world will reconcile 
me to a thin FalstafF, suggestive of vegetarianism 
and total abstinence. I am not even sure that I 
know what an intellectualized Hamlet is. I in- 



70 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

sist upon a Hamlet who shall wear black and who 
shall recite slowly the lines which shake me so 
when I read them at home, instead of intellectu- 
ally swallowing the lines as so many do. I cannot 
see how Mrs. Fiske's intellectuality qualifies her 
for playing robust, full-blooded women like Tess, 
or like Cyprienne in Divorgons. But I like Mrs. 
Fiske as Becky Sharpe and as Ibsen's Nora, be- 
cause both were small women. 

I imagine it is a sign of Wagner's genius that 
he made all his women of heroic stature. He must 
have foreseen that by the time a singer has 
learned to interpret Briinhilde she is apt to be 
mature and imposing. Thus I feel; and I know 
that most of the people in the audience agree 
with me. Those who do not have probably read 
in their evening papers that they were about to 
see an intellectual interpretation. Whenever 
they are puzzled by the actor they ascribe it to 
his intellect. 

When the final curtain falls, the play drops 
from us like a discarded cloak. People smile, dress, 
tell each other that it was a pretty good show, 
and hold the door open for the ladies to pass out 
inte the glow and snap of Broadway. We do not 
carry illusion away with us from the theater. In 
spite of the fact that we have purchased our 



THE SHOW 71 

tickets in the conviction that every husband and 
wife ought to see the play, we do not correlate 
the theater with life. Primarily it is a show. We 
do not ask much. If it has offered us a hearty 
laugh or two, a thrill, a pressure on the tear- 
ducts, this tolerant American public, this patient, 
innocent, cynical public that is always prepared 
to be cheated, feels grateful; and there ends the 
matter. 

And Aristotle? And the purging of the emo- 
tions through pity and terror? I still remember 
a play called The Diamond Breaker, which I saw 
on Third Avenue when Benjamin Harrison was 
President. I remember how the young mining en- 
gineer was foully beset by his rival and tied hand 
and foot and dropped into the open chute that 
led straight into the pitiless iron teeth of the 
stone-crushing machine. I remember how the 
heroine rushed out upon the gangway and seized 
the young engineer by the hair; and the wheels 
stopped; and the girl fainted; and strong men in 
the audience wept. Is it my own fault that such 
sensations are no longer to be had? Or has the 
drama indeed degenerated within these twenty 
years ? 

From the evening papers I gather that the 
crowd, after leaving the new nine-story Black- 



72 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

friars Theater, modeled after the Parthenon at 
Athens, invades and overruns the all-night res- 
taurants on Broadway. Yet the trains in the 
Subway are jammed, and Emmeline has to stand 
more than halfway to Belshazzar Court. 



IV 

THE GAME 



Often I think how monotonous life must be to 
Jerome D. Travers or Francis Ouimet, — com- 
pared, that is, with what life can offer to a player 
of my quality. When Travers drives off, it is a 
question whether the ball will go 245 yards or 260 
yards ; and a difference of fifteen yards is ob- 
viously nothing to thrill over. Whereas, when I 
send the ball from the tee the possible range of 
variation is always 100 yards, running from 155 
down to 55 ; provided, that is, that the ball starts 
at all. To me there is always a freshness of 
surprise in having the club meet the ball, which 
Travers, I dare say, has not experienced in the 
last dozen years. 

With him, of course, it is not sport, but mathe- 
matics. A wooden club will give one result, an 
iron another. The sensation of getting greater 
distance with a putting iron than with a brassie 

73 



74, BELSHAZZAR COURT 

is something Ouimet can hardly look forward to. 
Always mathematics, with this kind of swing 
laying the ball fifteen feet on the farther side of the 
hole, and that kind of chop laying it ten feet on 
the nearer side. I have frequently thought that 
playing off the finals for the golf championship is 
a waste of time. All that is necessary is to call 
in a professor of psychology and have him test 
Travers's blood-pressure and reaction index on 
the morning of the game, and then take " Chick " 
Evans's blood-pressure and reaction index. The 
referee would then award the game to Travers 
or to Evans by 2 up and 1 to play, or whatever 
score Professor Miinsterberg's figures would in- 
dicate. 

The true zest of play is for the duffer. When 
he swings club or racket he can never tell what 
miracles of accomplishment or negation it will 
perform. That is not an inanimate instrument 
he holds in his hands, but a living companion, a 
totem comrade whom he is impelled to propitiate, 
as Hiawatha crooned to his arrow before letting 
it fly from the string. And that is why duffers 
are peculiarly qualified to write about games, or 
for that matter, about everything, — literature, 
music, or art, — as they have always done. To be 
sufficiently inexpert in anything is to be fiUed 



THE GAME 75 

with corresponding awe at the hidden soul in that 
thing. To be sufficiently removed from perfec- 
tion is to worship it. Poets, for example, are 
preeminently the interpreters of life because they 
make such an awful mess of the practice of living. 
And for the same reason poets always retain the 
zest of life — because the poet never knows 
whether his next shot will land him on the green 
or in the sandpit, in Heaven or in the gutter. The 
reader will now be aware that in describing my 
status as a golfer I am not making a suicidal 
confession. On the contrary, I am presenting my 
credentials. 

n 

A great many people have been searching dur- 
ing ever so many years for the religion of democ- 
racy. I believe I have found it. That is, not a 
religion, if by it you mean a system completely 
equipped with creed, formularies, organization, 
home and foreign missions, schisms, an empty- 
church problem, an underpaid-minister's problem, 
a Socialist and I. W. W. problem, and the like; 
although, if I had the time to pursue my re- 
searches, I might find a parallel to many of these 
things. What I have in mind is a great demo- 
cratic rite, a ceremonial which is solemnized on 



76 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

six days in the week during six months in the 
year by large masses of men with such unfailing 
regularity and such unquestioning good faith that 
I cannot help thinking of it as essentially a re- 
ligious performance. 

It is a simple ceremonial, but impressive, like 
all manifestations of the soul of a multitude. I 
need only close my eyes to call up the picture 
vividly: It is a day of brilliant sunshine and a 
great crowd of men is seated in the open air, a 
crowd made up of all conditions, ages, races, tem- 
peraments, and states of mind. The crowd has 
sat there an hour or more, while the afternoon 
sun has slanted deeper into the west and the 
shadows have crept across greensward and hard- 
baked clay to the eastern horizon. Then, almost 
with a single motion, — ^^the time may be some- 
where between four-thirty and five o'clock, — this 
multitude of divers minds and tempers rises to its 
feet and stands silent, while one might count 
twenty perhaps. Nothing is said; no high priest 
intones prayer for this vast congregation; never- 
theless the impulse of ten thousand hearts is 
obviously focused into a single desire. When 
you have counted twenty the crowd sinks back to 
the benches. A half minute at most and the rite 
is over. 



THE GAME 77 

I am speaking, of course, of the second half of 
the seventh inning, when the home team comes to 
bat. The precise nature of this religious half 
minute depends on the score. If the home team 
holds a safe lead of three or four runs ; if the 
home pitcher continues to show everything, and 
the infield gives no sign of cracking, and the out- 
field isn't bothered by the sun, then I always 
imagine a fervent Te Deum arising from that in- 
articulate multitude, and the peace of a great 
contentment falling over men's spirits as they 
settle back in their seats. If the game is in the 
balance you must imagine the concentration of ten 
thousand wills on the spirit of the nine athletes 
in the field, ten thousand wills telepathically pour- 
ing their energies into the powerful arm of the 
man in the box, into the quick eye of the man on 
first base, and the sense of justice of the umpire. 

But if the outlook for victory is gloomy, the 
rite does not end with the silent prayer I have 
described. As the crowd subsides to the benches 
there arises a chant which I presume harks back 
to the primitive litanies of the Congo forests. 
Voices intone unkind words addressed to the play- 
ers on the other team. Ten thousand voices 
chanting in unison for victory, twenty thousand 
feet stamping confusion to the opposing pitcher 



78 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

— if this is not worship of the most fundamental 
sort, because of the most primitive sort, then 
what is religion? 

Consider the mere number of participants in 
this national rite of the seventh inning. I have 
said a multitude of ten thousand. But if the day 
be Saturday and the place of worship one of the 
big cities of either of the major leagues, the 
crowd may easily be twice as large. And all over 
the country at almost the same moment, exultant 
or hopeful or despairing multitudes are rising to 
their feet. Multiply this number of worshipers by 
six days — or by seven days if you are west of the 
Alleghanies, where Sunday baseball has somehow 
been reconciled with a still vigorous Puritanism 
— and it is apparent that a continuous wave of 
spiritual ardor sweeps over this continent between 
three-thirty and six p.m. from the middle of April 
to the middle of October. We can only guess at 
the total number of worshipers. The three major 
leagues will account for five millions. Add the 
minor leagues and the state leagues and the in- 
terurban contests — and the total of seventh-in- 
ning communicants grows overwhelming. Take 
the twenty-five million males of voting age in this 
country, assume one visit per head to a baseball 
park in the season, and the result is dazzling. 



THE GAME 79 

It is easier to estimate the number of wor- 
shipers than the intensity of the mood. I have 
no gauge for measuring the spiritual fervor which 
exhales on the baseball stadiums of the country 
from mid- April to mid-October, growing in ardor 
with the procession of the months, until it at- 
tains a climax of orgiastic frenzy in the World's 
Series. Foreigners are in the habit of calling this 
an unspiritual nation. But what nation so fre- 
quently tastes — or for that matter has ever 
tasted — the emotional experience of the score 
tied in the ninth inning with the bases full? For- 
eigners call us an unspiritual people because they 
do not know the meaning of a double-header late 
in September — a double-header with two seventh 
innings. 

I began by renouncing any claim to the discov- 
ery of a complete religion of democracy. But 
the temptation to point out parallels is irresistible. 
If Dr. Frazer had not finished with his Golden 
Bough, — or if he is thinking of a supplementary 
volume, — I can see how easily the raw material 
of the sporting columns would shape itself to 
religious forces and systems in his hands. If 
religious ceremonial has its origin in the play in- 
stinct of man, why go back to remote origins like 
the Australian corroboree and neglect Ty Cobb 



80 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

stealing second? If religion has its origin in 
primitive man's worship of the eternal rebirth of 
earth's fructifying powers with the advent of 
spring, how can we neglect the vivid stirring in 
the hearts of millions that marks the departure 
of the teams for spring training in Texas? 

If I were a trained professional sociologist in- 
stead of a mere spectator at the Polo Grounds, it 
seems to me that I should have little trouble in 
tracing the history of the game several thousand 
years back of its commonly accepted origin some- 
where about 1830. I could easily trace back the 
catcher's mask to the mask worn by the medicine- 
man among the Swahili of the West Coast. The 
three bases and home-plate would easily be the 
points of the compass, going straight back to 
the sun myth. Murray pulling down a fly in left 
field would hark back straight to Zoroaster and 
the sun-worshipers. Millions of primitive hunters 
must have anointed, and prayed to, their weapons 
before Jeff Tesreau addressed his invocation to 
the spit ball; and when Carl Mays winds himself 
up for delivering the ball, he is not far removed 
from the sacred warrior dancer of Polynesia. If 
only I were a sociologist! 

An ideal faith, this religion of baseball, the 
more you examine it. See, for instance, how it 



THE GAME 81 

satisfies the prime requirement of a true faith that 
it shall ever be present in the hearts of the faith- 
ful; practiced not once a week on Sunday, but six 
times a week — and in the West seven times a 
week; professed not only in the appointed place 
of worship, but in the Subway before the game, 
and in the Subway after the game, and in the 
offices and shops and factories on rainy days. If 
a true religion is that for which a man will give 
up wife and children and forget the call of meat 
and drink, what shall we say of baseball? If a 
true religion is not dependent on aesthetic trap- 
pings, but voices itself under the open sky and 
among the furniture of common life, this is again 
the true religion. The stadium lies open to the 
sun, the rain, and the wind. The mystic sense is 
not stimulated by Gothic roof-traceries and the 
dimmed light of stained-glass windows. The con- 
gregation rises from wooden benches on a con- 
crete flooring ; it stands in the full light of a sum- 
mer afternoon and lets its eyes rest on walls of 
bill-boards reminiscent of familiar things, — linen 
collars, table-waters, tobacco, safety-razors. 
Surely we have here a clear, dry, real religion of 
the kind that Bernard Shaw would approve. 

I have said quite enough on this point. Other- 
wise I should take time to show how this national 



82 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

faith has created its own architecture, as all great 
religions have done. Our national contribution 
to the building arts has so far been confined to 
two forms — the skyscraper and the baseball 
stadium, corresponding precisely to the two great 
religions of business and of play. I know that the 
Greeks and Romans had amphitheaters, and that 
the word stadium is not of native origin. But 
between the Coliseum and the baseball park there 
is all the difference that lies between imperialism 
and democracy. The ancient amphitheaters were 
built as much for monuments as for playgrounds. 
Consequently they were impressed with an aesthetic 
character which is totally repugnant to our idea 
of a baseball park. 

There is no spiritual resemblance between Ves- 
pasian's amphitheater with its stone and marble, 
its galleries and imperial tribunes, its purple 
canvases stretched out against the sun — and our 
own Polo Grounds. Iron girders, green wooden 
benches, and a back fence frescoed with safety- 
razors and ready-made clothing — what more would 
a modern man have? The ancient amphitheaters 
were built for slaves who had to be flattered and 
amused by pretty things. The baseball park is 
for freemen who pay for their pleasures and can 
afford the ugliest that money can buy. 



THE GAME 83 

m 

The art of keeping my eye on the ball is some- 
thing I no longer have hope of mastering. If I 
fail to watch the ball it is because I am continu- 
ally watching faces about me. The same habit 
pursues me on the street and in all public places 
— usually with unpleasant consequences, though 
now and then I have the reward of catching the 
reflection of a great event or a tense moment in 
the face of the man next to me. Then, indeed, I 
am repaid; but it is a procedure fatal to the 
scientific pursuit of baseball. While I am hunt- 
ing in the face of the man next to me for the re- 
flection of Doyle's stinging single between first and 
second base, I hear a roar and turn to find that 
something dramatic has happened at third, and a 
stout young man in a green hat behind me says 
that the runner was out by a yard and should be 
benched for trying to spike the man on the bag. 

The eagle vision of the stout young man behind 
me always fills me with amazement and envy. I 
concede his superior knowledge of the game. He 
knows every man on the field by his walk. He 
recalls under what circumstances the identical 
play was pulled off three years ago in Philadel- 
phia. He knows beforehand just at what moment 



84 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

Mr. McGraw will take his left fielder out of the 
game and send in a " pinch hitter." Long years 
of steady application will no doubt supply this 
kind of post-graduate expertship. But when it 
is a question not of theory but of a simple, con- 
crete play which I did happen to be watching 
carefully, how is it that the man behind me can 
see that the runner was out by a yard and had 
nearly spiked the man on the bag, whereas all I 
can see is a tangle of legs and arms and a cloud 
of dust? My eyesight is normal; how does my 
neighbor manage to see all that he does as quickly 
as he does? 

The answer is that he does not see. When he 
declares that the runner was out by a yard, and 
I turn around and regard him with envy, it is a 
comfort to have the umpire decide that the runner 
was safe after all. It is a comfort to hear the 
man behind me say that the ball cut the plate 
squarely, and to have the umpire call it a ball. It 
shakes my faith somewhat in human nature, but 
it strengthens my self-confidence. Yet it fails to 
shake the self-confidence of the man behind me. 
When I turn about to see his crestfallen face, I 
find him chewing peanut-brittle in a state of su- 
preme calm, and as I stare at him, fascinated by 
such peace of mind in the face of discomfiture, I 



THE GAME 85 

hear a yell and turn to find the third baseman 
and all the outfield congregated near the left 
bleachers. I have made a psychological observa- 
tion, but have missed the beginning of a double 
play. 

My chagrin is temporary. As the game goes 
on my self-confidence grows enormously. I am 
awakening to the fact that the man behind me 
knows as little about the game as I do. When 
the pitcher of the visiting team delivered the first 
ball of the first inning, the man behind me re- 
marked that the pitcher didn't have anything. 
My neighbor could tell by the pitcher's arm ac- 
tion that he was stale, and he recalled that the 
pitcher in question never did last more than half 
a game. This declaration of absolute belief did 
not stand in the way of a contradictory remark, 
made some time in the fifth inning, with our team 
held so far to two scratch hits. The stout young 
man behind me then said that the visiting pitcher 
was a wonder, that he had everything, that he 
would keep on fanning them till the cows came 
home, and that he was, in fact, the best southpaw 
in both leagues, having once struck out eight men 
in an eleven-inning game at Boston. 

When a man gives vent to such obviously irrec- 
oncilable statements in less than five innings, it 



86 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

is inevitable that I should turn in my seat to get 
a square look at him. But I still find him calm 
and eating peanut-brittle; and as I stare at him 
and try to classify him, the man at the bat does 
something which brings half the crowd to its feet. 
By dint of much inquiry I discover that he has 
rolled a slow grounder to third and has made his 
base on it. Decidedly, psychology and baseball 
will not mix. 

I suppose the stout young man behind me is a 
Fan, — provided there is really such a type. My 
own belief is that the Fan, as the baseball writers 
and cartoonists have depicted him, is a very rare 
thing. To the extent that he does exist he is the 
creation, not of the baseball diamond, but of the 
sporting writer and the comic artist. The Fan 
models himself consciously upon the type set be- 
fore him in his favorite newspaper. It is once 
more a case of nature imitating art. If Mr. Gib- 
son, many years ago, had not drawn a picture of 
fat men in shirt-sleeves, perspiring freely and 
waving straw hats, the newspaper artist would 
not have imitated Mr. Gibson, and the baseball 
audience would not have imitated the newspapers. 
It is true that I have seen baseball crowds in 
frenzy; but these have been isolated moments of 
high tension when all of us have been brought to 



THE GAME 87 

our feet with loud explosions of joy or agony. 
But the perspiring, ululant Fan in shirt-sleeves, 
ceaselessly waving his straw hat, uttering impre- 
cations on the enemy, his enthusiasm obviously 
aroused by stimulants preceding his arrival at 
the baseball park, is far from being representative 
of the baseball crowd. 

The spirit of the audience is best expressed in 
quite a different sort of person. He is always 
to be seen at the Polo Grounds, and when I think 
of baseball audiences it is he who rises before me, 
to the exclusion of his fat, perspiring brother with 
the straw hat. He is young, tall, slender, wears 
blue serge, and even on very cool days in the early 
spring he goes without an overcoat. He sits out 
the game with folded arms, very erect, thin-lipped, 
and with the break of a smile around the eyes. 
He is usually alone, and has little to say. He is 
not a snob ; he will respond to his neighbor's com- 
ments in moments of exceptional emotional stress, 
but he does not wear his heart on his sleeve. 

I imagine him sitting, in very much the same 
attitude, in college lecture-rooms, or taking in- 
structions from the head of the office. Complete 
absorption under complete control — he fascinates 
me. While the stout young man behind me chat- 
ters on for his own gratification, forgetting one 



88 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

moment what he said the moment before, — an 
empty-headed young man with a tendency to pro- 
fanity as the game goes on, — this other trim 
young figure in blue serge, with folded arms, sits 
immobile, watching, watching with a calm that 
must come out of real knowledge and experi- 
ence, enjoying the thing immensely, but giv- 
ing no other sign than a sharper glint of 
the eye, a slight opening of the lips. In a mo- 
ment of crisis, being only human, he rises with 
the rest of us, but deliberately, to follow the course 
of a high fly down the foul line far toward the 
bleachers. When the ball is caught he smiles and 
sits down and folds his arms. I envy him his 
capacity for drinking in enjoyment without dis- 
play. This is the kind of Fan I should like to be. 

IV 

Does my thin-lipped friend in blue serge read 
the sporting page? I wonder. My own opinion 
is that he does not, except to glance through the 
box-score. It is for the other man, I imagine, the 
stout young man behind me who detected from 
the first ball thrown that the pitcher's arm was 
no good, and who later identified him as the best 
southpaw in the two leagues, that the sporting 



THE GAME 89 

page with its humor, its philosophy, its art, and 
its poetry, is edited. The sporting page has long 
ceased to be a mere chronicle of sport and has 
become an encyclopaedia, an anthology, a five-foot 
book-shelf, a little university in itself. The life 
mirrored in the pictures on the sporting page is 
not restricted to the prize-ring and the diamond, 
though the language of the prize-ring and the 
baseball field is its vernacular. The art of the 
sporting page has expanded beyond the narrow 
field of play to life itself, viewed as play. 

The line of development is plain: from pictures 
of the Fan at the game the advance has been to 
pictures of the Fan at home, and so on to his 
wife and his young, and his Weltanschauung, until 
now the artist frequently casts aside all pretense 
of painting sport and draws pictures of humanity. 
The sporting cartoon has become a social 
chronicle. It is still found on the sporting page ; 
partly, I suppose, because it originated there, 
partly because there is no other place in the paper 
where it can get so wide an audience. It entraps 
the man in the street who comes to read base- 
ball and remains to study contemporary life — 
in violent, exaggerated form, but life none the 
less. 

Even poetry. Sporting columns to-day run 



90 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

heavily to verse. Here, as well as in the pictures, 
there has been an evolution. From the mere 
rhymed chronicle of what happened to Christy 
Mathewson we have passed on to generalized re- 
flections on life, expressed, of course, in terms of 
the game. Kipling has been the great model. His 
lilt and his " punch " are so admirably adapted 
to the theme and the audience. How many thou- 
sand parodies of " Danny Deever " and " The 
Vampire " have the sporting editors printed? I 
should hesitate to say. But Kipling and his 
younger imitators, with Henley's " Invictus " and 
" When I was a King in Babylon," and the late 
Langdon Smith's " Evolution " : " When I was a 
Tadpole and You were a Fish " — have become the 
patterns for a vast popular poetry which deals in 
the main with the red-blooded virtues, — grit, good 
humor, and clean hitting, — but which drops with 
surprising frequency for an optimist race into 
the mood of Ecclesiastes : — 

Demon of Slow and of Fast Ones, 
Monarch of Moisture and Smoke, 
Who made Wagner swing at Anyoldthing, 
And Baker look like a Joke. 

And the writer goes on to remind the former 
king of the boxmen that sooner or later " Old 



THE GAME 91 

Pop " Tempus asks for waivers on the best of us, 
and that Matty and Johnson must in due time 
make way for 

Youngsters with pep from the Texas Steppe — 
The Minors wait for us all. 

Yes, you prince of batsmen, who amidst the 
bleachers' roar, 

Strolled to the plate with your T. Cobb gait. 
Hitting .364— 

alas. Old Pop Tempus has had his way with you, 
too: — 

Your Average now is Rancid 

And the Pellet you used to maul 

In Nineteen O Two has the Sign on you — 

The Minors wait for us all. 

Not that it matters, of course. The point is to 
keep on smiling and unafraid in Bushville as un- 
der the Main Tent, always doing one's best. 

To swing at the Pill with right good will, 
Hitting .164. 

This is evidently something more than a sport- 
ing page. This is a cosmology. 



92 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

V 

Will those gentlemen who are in the habit of 
sneering at professional baseball kindly explain 
why it is precisely the professional game which 
has inspired the newspaper poets? Personally I 
like professional baseball, and for the very rea- 
sons why so many persons profess to dislike it. 
The game is played for money by men who play 
all the time. They would rather win than lose, 
but they are not devoured by the passion for vic- 
tory. They will play with equal zest for Chicago 
to-day and for Boston to-morrow. But when you 
say all this you are really asserting what I have 
discovered to be a fact, — unless Mr. G. K. Ches- 
terton has discovered it before me, — that only in 
professional sport does the true amateur spirit 
survive. 

By the amateur spirit I mean the spirit which 
places the game above the victory; which takes 
joy, though it may be a subdued joy, in the per- 
fect coordination of mind and muscle and nerve; 
which plays to win because victory is the best 
available test of ability, but which is all the time 
aware that life has other interests than the stand- 
ing of the clubs and the Golf Committee's official 
handicap. I contend that the man who plays to 



THE GAME 93 

live is a better amateur than the man who lives to 
play. I am not thinking now of the actual amount 
of time one gives to the game, though even then 
it might be shown that Mr. Walter J. Travis de- 
voted more hours to golf than Christy Mathewson 
devoted to baseball. I am thinking rather of the 
adjustment of the game to the general scheme of 
life. It seems to be pretty well established that 
when your ordinary amateur takes up golf he 
deteriorates as a citizen, a husband and father; 
but I cannot imagine Mr. Walter Johnson neg- 
lecting his family in his passion for baseball. As 
between the two, where do you find the true 
amateur spirit? 

I insist. Professional baseball lacks the pic- 
turesque and stimulating accessories of an inter- 
collegiate game — the age-old rivalries, the mus- 
tering of the classes, the colors, the pretty 
women, the cheering carried on by young leaders 
to the verge of apoplexy. But after all, why this 
Saturnalia of pumped-up emotion over the win- 
ning of a game? The winning, it will be ob- 
served, and not the playing. Compared with 
such an exhibition of the lust for victory, a pro- 
fessional game, with its emphasis on the perform- 
ance and not on the result, comes much nearer to 
the true heart of the play instinct. An old topic 



9* BELSHAZZAR COURT 

this, and a perilous one. Before I know it I shall 
be advocating the obsolete standards of English 
sport, which would naturally appeal to a duffer. 
Well, I will take the consequences and boldly as- 
sert that there is such a thing as playing too 
keenly, — even when playing with perfect fairness, 
— such a thing as bucking the line too hard. 

It is distortion of life values. After all, there 
are things worth breaking your heart to achieve 
and others that are not worth while. Francis 
Ouimet's victory over Vardon and Ray is some- 
thing we are justly proud of; not so much as a 
display of golf, but as a display of our unrivaled 
capacity for rallying all the forces of one's being 
to the needs of the moment; for its display of 
that grit and nerve on which our civilization has 
been built so largely. Only observe, Ouimet's 
victory was magnificent, but it was not play. It 
was fought in the fierce spirit of the struggle for 
existence which it is the purpose of play to make 
us forget. It was Homeric, but who wants base- 
ball or tennis or golf to be Homeric? Herbert 
Spencer was not merely petulant when he said 
that to play billiards perfectly argued a misspent 
life. He stated a profound truth. To play as 
Ouimet did against Vardon and Ray argues a 
distortion of the values of life. What shall it 



THEGAME 95 

profit us if we win games and lose our sense of 
the proportion of things? It is immoral. 

I think William T. Tilden's hurricane service 
is immoral. I confess that when Tilden soars 
up from the base line like a combination Mer- 
cury and Thor, and pours the entire strength 
of his lithe, magnificent body through the racket 
into the ball, it is as beautiful a sight as any of 
the Greek sculptors have left us. But I cannot 
share the crowd's delight when Tilden's oppo- 
nent stands helpless before that hurtling, twist- 
ing missile of fate. What satisfaction is there in 
developing a tennis service which nobody can re- 
turn? The natural advantage wliich the rules of 
the game confer on the server ceases to be an 
advantage and becomes merely a triumph of ma- 
chinery, even if it is human machinery. A game 
of tennis which is won on aces is opposed to the 
very spirit of play. As a matter of fact, the 
crowd admits this when it applauds a sharp rally 
over the net, for then it is rejoicing in play, 
whereas applause for an ace is simply joy in win- 
ning. I repeat: Tilden making one of his 
magnificent kills on the return is play; Tilden 
shooting his unreturnable service from the back 
line is merely a scientific engineer — and nothing 
is more immoral than scientific management, es- 



96 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

pecially when applied to anything really worth 
while in life. Incidentally, a change in the rules 
of tennis seems unavoidable. The ball, instead 
of being handed over to McLoughlin for sure de- 
struction, will have to be thrown into the court by 
the umpire, as in polo. 



VI 



You will now see why I am so much drawn to 
the slender young man in blue serge who sits with 
folded arms and only smiles when Mr. Doyle is 
caught napping on first. It is because I am con- 
vinced that he sees the game as it ought to be seen, 
— with an intense sympathy and understanding, 
but, after all, with a sense of humor which recog- 
nizes that a great world lies outside the Polo 
Grounds. You would not think that such a world 
existed from the way in which the stout young 
man behind me has been carrying on. It will be 
recalled that he began by instantly discovering 
that the visiting pitcher's arm was no good. This 
discovery he had modified by the end of the fourth 
inning to the extent that the visiting pitcher now 
had everything. At the beginning of the ninth 
inning this revised opinion still held good. The 
score was 2 to against the home team, and the 



THE GAME 97 

stout young man got up in disgust, remarking 
that he had no use for a bunch of cripples who 
presumed to go up against a real team. 

But he did not go home. He hovered in the 
aisle, and when the home team, in the second half 
of the ninth, bunched four hits and won the game, 
the stout young man hurled himself down the 
aisle and out upon the field, shrieking madly. 
But the thin young man in blue serge got to his 
feet, smiled, made some observation to his neigh- 
bor in an undertone, which I failed to catch, and 
walked away. 



NIGHT LIFE 

The sun heaves up from its sleeping-place 
somewhere in the vicinity of Flatbush, an ex- 
tremely early riser, like most suburban residents, 
and loses no time in setting out upward and west- 
ward to its place of business over Manhattan. 
But the sun is not the first comer there. Its 
earliest rays surprise an army at work. 
Creatures of the night, they cower and dissolve in 
the oncoming of the light. The yellow glare of 
their oil torches and the ghastly violet-blue of 
their vacuum tubes pale, flicker, and go out be- 
fore the onrush of dawn. It is amazing how a 
great city can snore with equanimity while entire 
regiments and squadrons carry on operations in 
the streets, quietly but with no attempt at con- 
cealment, under the very eyes of the police with 
whom, in fact, they seem to have a complete un- 
derstanding. No political revolutions in the name 
of good citizenship, no shifting of Commission* 
ers and Inspectors and Captains, can conceivably 

98 



NIGHT LIFE 99 

destroy the entente cordiale between the police 
and these workers in the dark. If anything, the 
patrolman will stop in his rounds to watch their 
maneuvers with an eye of amicable appraisal, and 
when they begin to scatter with the dawn from 
their places of congregation he speeds them on 
their way with a word of cheer. 

And the great city sleeps, its pulse scarcely dis- 
turbed by the feverish activity of the army of 
darkness. Or if the city catches a rumble of their 
movements and stirs in its slumber, it is only to 
turn over and go to sleep again. No hypnotic 
spell will account for this indifference of a city of 
five millions to the presence of an army in its gas- 
lit streets. It is merely habit. If here and there 
in the cubical hives where New York takes its rest 
an unquiet sleeper tosses in his bed and resents the 
disturbance, it is not to wish that these prowlers 
of the night were caught and sent to jail, but 
only to wish that they went about their business 
more discreetly — this great host of marketmen, 
grocers, butchers, milkmen, push-cart engineers, 
and news vendors who have been engaged since 
soon after midnight in the enormous task of pre- 
paring the city's breakfast. 

For this, of course, is the real night life of New 
York — the life that beats at rapid pace in the 



100 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

great water-front markets, in the newspaper 
press-rooms around Brooklyn Bridge, under the 
acetylene glare over excavations for the new 
Subways, and in the thousand bakery shops that 
line the avenues and streets. This is the Under- 
world of which we speak so little because it is a 
real underworld. It is not made up of subter- 
ranean galleries and shafts inhabited by a race 
engaged in undermining the upper world. It is 
a true Underworld on which the upper world of 
the daylight hours is grounded. The foundations 
of society run down into the night where the city's 
food, the city's ways of communication, and the 
city's news are being made ready and garnished 
for the full roar of the day's life. Compared 
with these workers of the dark the operations 
of the housebreaker and his sister of the shadowy 
sidewalks sink into insignificance. It is but a turn 
of the hand for the army of the laborious Under- 
world to undo the mischief which the outlaws of 
the night have performed. Between one and five 
in the morning they create ten thousand times the 
wealth which it is in the power of the jail-bird to 
destroy. 

The point fascinates me. We need urgently a 
vindication of the night, and especially of night 
in the city. Occasionally, it is true, we pay lip 



S^^^^'r 



;:.""llr;.'r 







At Thirty-fourth Street the Traffic Thickens 



NIGHT LIFE 101 

service to Night as the kindly nurse that brings 
rest to the fevered brow and forgetfulness to the 
uneasy conscience. But at heart we think of the 
things of night as of things of evil. It would pay 
to set to work a commission of moralists, economic 
experts and statisticians, at striking a balance be- 
tween the good and evil that are done in the night 
and the day. Personally I have no doubt at all 
as to which way the figures would point. It is 
only a question of how far the day is behind the 
night in its net contribution to the welfare of 
humanity. Against night in Greater New York 
you would have to debit, say, half a hundred 
burglaries and highway assaults, a handful of 
fires, a handful of joy-ride fatalities, much 
gambling and debauchery, and possibly some of 
the latest plays on Broadway. But from the 
monetary point of view the wastage and pilfer- 
ings of the night are a trifle compared to what an 
active quarter of an hour may show in Wall 
Street after ten in the morning. And as for the 
moral laxities of the dark it depends on what you 
call immorality. Greater harm to the fiber of 
the race may be wrought during the day by the 
intrigues of unscrupulous business, by factory 
fire-traps, by sweat-shops, by the manipulators of 
our political democracy, than by all the gambling 



102 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

houses and dives in the Tenderloin. After all, the 
railroad-wrecking financiers, the get-rich-quick 
promoters, the builders of jerry tenements, the 
bank looters, bosses, and ward heelers suspend 
their labors at night. 

No ; the more you think of it the more you will 
be persuaded that night is primarily the time of 
the innocent industries, and for the most part 
the primitive industries, employing simple, inno- 
cent, primitive men — slow-speaking truck farmers, 
husky red-faced slaughterers in the abattoirs, 
solid German bakers, and milkmen. The milkman 
alone is enough to redeem the night from its un- 
deserved evil reputation. A cartload of pasteur- 
ized milk for nurslings at four o'clock in the 
morning represents more service to civilization 
than a cartful of bullion on its way from the Sub- 
treasury to the vaults of a national bank five hours 
later. 

I am, of course, not thinking now of the 
early part of the night on Broadway, which is 
only the bedraggled fringe of day, but of the later 
half of night which is the fresh anticipation of 
the dawn. In the still coolness before daybreak 
the interests of the city come down to human es- 
sentials. The commodities dealt in are those that 
men bought and sold tens of thousands of years 



NIGHT LIFE 103 

before they trafficked in safety-razors and Bra- 
zilian diamonds. The dealers of the night are 
concerned with bread, flesh, milk, butter, cheese, 
fruits, and the green offerings of the fields. Con- 
tact with these things cannot but keep the soul 
clean. There is a fortune for the nerve specialist 
who will first advise his patients to rise at 
three in the morning and walk a mile between the 
rows of wagons and stalls in Gansevoort or 
Wallabout Market and draw strength from the 
piles of sweet green produce dewy under the lamp- 
light, and learn patience from the farmer's horsesj 
and observe that even men in their chafFerings 
can be subdued to the innocent medium in which 
they traffic. 

To be sure there are the newspaper men. I 
have always assumed that it is primarily for them 
the churches in the lower part of the city offer 
special services for night-workers. If any class 
of night-workers stands in need of prayer it must 
be the men of my own profession, surely the least 
innocent of all legitimate trades that are plied 
after midnight. But as I think of it, even among 
newspaper men it is the comparatively unspoiled 
and innocent who work after midnight, members 
of the lobster squad left on emergency duty, cubs 
who have not lost all the freshness of the little 



104 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

towns in the Middle West and the South, the men 
on the linotype machines, the men sweating in 
the press-rooms, and the short, squat unshaven 
men who stagger under enormous bundles of 
newspapers to the cars and the elevated trains. 
Here, too, night has exercised its cleansing selec- 
tive effect. The big men of the press, the shrewd 
manipulators of newspaper policy, the editorial 
pleaders of doubtful causes, the city editors with 
insistence on the " punch " as against the fact, 
the Titans of the advertising columns, have all 
gone home before midnight. As I think of it, the 
only unrespectable members of the newspaper pro- 
fession that work at S a.m. are the writers of 
the Extra Special afternoon editions for the next 
day. Let us hope that they take advantage of 
the churches' standing offer of special services 
and prayer for night-workers. 

When you stroll through the markets, between 
rows of wagons, stalls, crates, baskets, and squads 
of perspiring men, you need not force the imagi- 
nation to call up the solid square miles of brick 
and stone barracks in which New York's five 
million, minus some thousands, are asleep, out- 
side the glare of the arc lights and kerosene 
torches. You can tell Hercules from his foot and 
you can tell New York from the size of its maw, 



NIGHT LIFE 105 

of which a single day's filling keeps these thou- 
sands of men at work. There it sleeps, the big, 
dark brute, and in another three hours it 
will yawn and sit up and blink its eyes and roar 
for its food. The markets are only the spots of 
highest activity in the business of providing fod- 
der for the creature. Turn out of the crush of 
Gansevoort Market and walk south through 
Washington Street and Greenwich Street and 
Hudson Street, a good mile and a half south 
through silent warehouses all crammed with food, 
a solid square mile of provender. The contents 
of these grim weather-beaten storehouses are 
open to appraisal by the mere sense of smell as 
you pass through successive strata of coifee, and 
sugar, and tea, and spices, and green vegetables, 
and fruits. If you are sufficiently educated you 
may detect the individual species within the genus, 
discern where the pepper merges into cloves, and 
the heavy odor of banana into the acid aroma 
of the citrus. It seems almost indecent, this vast 
debauch of gluttony, this great area given up 
to the most elemental of the appetites, this Ten- 
derloin of the stomach, until you once more recall 
the five million individual cells of the animal that 
will soon have to be fed. 

The markets and the warehouses are not the 



106 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

belly of the city, as Zola has called them in his 
own Paris. The digestive processes of a great 
city are worked out later and in a million homes. 
The markets are the heart of the city, pumping 
the life-fuel to themselves from across the rivers 
and the seas, and pumping them out again by 
drayloads and cartloads through the avenues and 
streets. In the late afternoon of the day before, 
everywhere on the circumference of the city, you 
have come across the driblets and streamlets of 
nourishment which the markets suck to them- 
selves. In Jersey, in Long Island, and in West- 
chester you encounter, toward nightfall, heavy 
farm-wagons of exactly the prairie-schooner type 
that you first met in the school histories, plodding 
on toward the ferries and the bridges, the drivers 
nodding over the reins, the horses philosoph- 
ically conscious of the long hours as well as the 
long miles ahead of them. Taken one by one, 
these farmer's wagons moving at two miles an 
hour seem pitifully inadequate to the appetites 
and imperious demands of a metropolis. But they 
are only the unquestioning units in the great 
mobilization of the army of food providers. Their 
cubic contents and their rate of progress have 
been accurately estimated by the Von Moltkes of 
the provision markets. At the appointed time 



NIGHT LIFE 107 

they will drop into their appointed place, form- 
ing by companies and squadrons into hollow 
squares for the daily encounter with human- 
ity's oldest and most indefatigable foe — ^hunger. 

The markets on the water-front are the heart 
of the city's night life, but in all the five boroughs 
there are local centers of concentrated vitality — 
the milk depots, the street-railway junctions, the 
car barns. Where Elevated or Subway meets with 
Crosstown and longitudinal surface lines you 
will find at three in the morning as active and 
garishly illuminated a civic center as many a city 
of the hinterland would boast of at nine o'clock 
in the evening. Groups of switchmen, car dis- 
patchers, conductors, motormen, and the casual 
onlooker whom New York supplies from its inex- 
haustible womb even at three in the morning, stand 
in the middle of the road and discuss the most 
wonderful mysteries — so it seems at least in the 
hush before dawn. And because the cars which 
they switch and side track and dispatch on their 
way depart empty of passengers and lose them- 
selves in the shadows, their business, too, seems 
one of impressive mystery. 

A car conductor at three o'clock in the morn- 
ing is the most delightful of people to meet. His 
hands are not yet grimy with the filth of alien 



108 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

nickels and dimes. His temper is as yet unworn 
with the day's traffic. In the beneficent cool of 
the night his thwarted social instincts unfold. If 
you share the rear platform with him, which you 
will do as a rule, he will accept your fare with a 
deprecating smile as money passes between gen- 
tlemen who stoop to the painful necessity but take 
no notice of it. Having registered your fare, he 
will engage you in conversation, and it is amaz- 
ing how the harassed soul of the car conductor is 
open to the ideas and forces that rule the great 
world. If you are timid with conductors and 
take your way into the car after paying your 
fare, he will make a pretense of business with the 
motorman and, coming back, he will find a remark 
to draw you out of your surliness or your timid- 
ity. He may even sit down next to you and after 
five minutes you will be cursing the mechanical 
necessity of the daylight life which takes this 
eminently human creature and turns him into a 
bundle of rasping hurry and incivility. If a visit 
to the markets is a good cure for neurosis, a trip 
down Amsterdam Avenue in a surface car at three 
A.M. is a splendid tonic for democracy. 

And once more food. For the men who labor in 
the night, primarily for the city's breakfast, must 
themselves be fed. Clustered around the markets. 



NIGHT LIFE 109 

and around the railway junctions and car barns, 
are the brilliantly illuminated Shanleys and Del- 
monicos of the industrious Underworld. What 
places of warm cheer they are, on a winter night, 
these long rows of Lunches, whose names are a 
perpetual lesson in the national geography — 
Baltimore Lunch, Hartford Lunch, Washington 
Lunch, New Orleans and Memphis and Utica and 
Milwaukee Lunches. They all have tiled floors 
and white walls and spacious arm-chairs with a 
table extension like the chairs in which we used 
to write examination papers at college. In the 
rear of the room is the counter supporting the 
great silver coffee-urn. The placards on the 
walls reek with plenty. You wonder how the re- 
sources of an establishment operating on an aver- 
age level of fifteen cents the meal can supply the 
promised bounty — sirloins and small steaks, and 
shellfish out of season and all the delicacies of the 
griddle and the casserole ; — only the prudent con- 
sumer will concentrate on the coffee and dough- 
nuts. The rarities are to be had, if you insist, 
and who would quarrel with the quality of a sir- 
loin steak selling for twenty cents with bread, 
butter, and coffee, at three in the morning? But 
it is better to ask for coffee and doughnuts. 
An affable humanism permeates the Baltimore 



110 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

Lunch. The proprietor, the chef, the waiter, and 
the cashier will come forward to meet you and 
exchange a word or two with you as he wipes up 
the arm-table. He will take your order, and go- 
ing behind the counter, will deliver it to himself. 
If you are extravagant and ask for meats, he will 
disappear into some sort of cupboard, which is a 
kitchen, and pleasant pungent odors will precede 
his reappearance. He will punch your check as 
a protection against malfeasance by the waiter 
and he will ring up your payment on the cash- 
register as a protection against malfeasance on 
the part of the cashier. If your manners permit 
he will come forward and watch you while you 
eat, not with the affected paternal mien of the 
head waiter at the Waldorf, but as a brother, a 
democrat, and a chef who has presided over your 
food from the first moment till the last and is 
qualified to take an intimate interest in its ulti- 
mate disposal. He is generous with the butter, 
and as a rule he is indifferent to tips. 

Can I do you justice, oh Baltimore Lunchman 
of the Gay White Way in the vicinity of Broad- 
way and Manhattan Streets, where the enormous 
black iron span of the Subway viaduct casts its 
shadow over all the cars that run west to Fort 
Lee and north to Fort George and south into the 



NIGHT LIFE 111 

deserted regions of lower Broadway? Your nap- 
kins unquestionably were white once upon a time, 
and your apron is but so-so, but your heart is in 
the right place, and consequently your manners 
are perfect. On you, too, the night has exercised 
its cleansing effect, wiping out commercialism and 
leaving behind the instinct for service. You ac- 
cept my money, but only that you may have the 
means to go on feeding the useful toilers of the 
night and occasional castaways like myself. The 
spirit of profit does not lurk under your flaring 
arc lights ; where is the profit in sirloin steak with 
bread, butter, and coffee at twenty cents? You 
are not a trafficker in food, but a minister to 
human needs, almost as disinterested as the dogs 
of St. Bernard, of whom, if you don't mind my 
saying so, you strongly remind me, with your 
solid bulk and great shock of hair and the two 
days' beard and your strangely unmanicured 
fingers. You do not cater to the pampered palate 
of the rich, which lusts for strange plants and 
strange animals and strange liquids to devour. 
Your sizzling coffee is nectar in the veins of big 
men who run in on winter nights stamping their 
feet and smiting their palms stiff from the icy 
brake-handle and switching-lever — the simple, in- 
nocent toilers of the night. Occasionally your 



112 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

walls resound to the gayety of young voices and 
your arc lights glow on the shimmer of linen and 
silks which put your regular customers somewhat 
out of countenance, as when a troop of young 
men and girls after loitering wickedly at the dance 
seek refuge with you while waiting for a car. 
They taste your coffee and nibble at your dough- 
nuts for a lark. So they say. It is pretense. 
They do not nibble, they do not taste; they eat 
and drink with undeniable relish the rough, un- 
familiar fare. After five hours' exercise on the 
dancing floor and a ten minutes' wait on a wintry 
corner there is an electric spark in your coffee 
and Titan's food in your doughnuts. Motormen, 
draymen, young men and women in dancing 
pumps, what a line of customers is yours 1 Oh 
Youth I Oh Night! Oh Baltimore LunchmanI 

The gray of dawn overtakes the armies from the 
markets, the car barns, and the excavation pits 
in full retreat. They scatter in every direction, 
weary, heavy-eyed, but with no sense of defeat in 
their souls. They throng to the river to lose them- 
selves in the mysterious wilds of Jersey. Their 
cavalry and train rumble down empty Broadway to 
South Ferry. They pour eastward toward the 
bridges or hide themselves in the cellars and ram- 
shackle comer booths of the East side. They 



NIGHT LIFE lis 

plunge into the Subway and, stretched out at full 
length in the illuminated spaciousness of the In- 
terborough's cars, they pass off into the sleep 
which falls alike upon the just and the unjust, 
contrary to general supposition. When the day 
breaks it finds their haunting-places deserted or 
given over to small brigades of sweepers and clean- 
ers who make ready for the other kinds of busi- 
ness that are carried on in the full glare of the 
sun. 

Blessed are the meek! While waiting for the 
inheritance of the earth they are already in full 
possession of the glory of the sunrise, which we 
of the comfortable classes know only by hearsay. 
The tremulous milky gray of the firmament fol- 
lowed by the red flush of daylight is reserved in 
New York for the truck farmer from the suburbs, 
the drayman, the food vendors, and the early fac- 
tory hands. For them only is the beauty of New 
York as it heaves up out of the shadows. The 
farmer who has disposed of his wares with ex- 
pedition and is now on his way back to the Jersey 
shore, when he looks back, sees the jagged silhou- 
ette of our towers and massed brick p) es Uke a 
host of negroid Titans plodding northward in re- 
treat. Or if his way is by the Municipal boats to 
Staten Island, he may look back and see a thin 



114 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

shaft of light, ethereal, tremulous, almost of 
faery, and that pillar of light will be Broadway 
canyon between its brick walls still clad in shadow. 
It is given only to the foreign-bom ditchers and 
hewers of the crowded lower Bronx, as they 
trudge across the bridges over the Harlem, to see 
before them mighty iron spans flung forward into 
the shadows or to catch the mirrored sweep of 
magic arches lifting up out of the water to link 
themselves to the arch overhead. 

The beauty of New York, rising to meet a new 
day, is for these lowly workers, and for the unfor- 
tunates who stay out in the night not to work, 
but to sleep, because night and the open is their 
only refuge. When the curtain of night rises on 
Riverside and reveals Grant's Tomb in frosty 
vagueness at the end of a green vista, the sight is 
rarely for those who sleep in the expensive 
caravansaries along the Drive, and most often for 
the sleepers on the benches. It is the men who 
sleep on the benches in Morningside Park that are 
the first to wonder at the dark line of poplars 
holding desperate defense against the charging 
line of daylight, and over the poplars the huge, 
squat octagon of St. John's buttressed chapels ; un- 
less the sleepers on the benches are anticipated by 
the angel atop of St. John's greeting the dawn 



NIGHT LIFE 115 

with his trumpet. Because night loiterers are 
excluded from Central Park, I suppose that all its 
awakening loveliness must go for naught. But 
if the first impingement of the sun on the massed 
verdure of the park, on its lakes, its Alpine views, 
its waterfalls, and the fresh, sweet meadows, does 
find a rare spectator, it must be again one of the 
homeless who has eluded police regulations to find 
a night's rest in the great green inclosure. Pos- 
sibly there may be a poet or two wandering about 
in Central Park at dawn, but the poets are early 
risers only in the country. To them the city is 
only the monstrous, noisy machine of the full day. 
That on New York City, too, the sun rises in the 
morning, working its miracles of beauty, seems 
to have escaped the poets ; or else they have es- 
caped me. 

As the sun continues to mount from Flatbush 
towards the East River bridges, the demoraliza- 
tion of the hosts of night-workers grows complete. 
Either they have disappeared or they straggle 
on through isolated streets, mere units, like the 
flotsam of a beaten army. The full light strips 
them of their dignity. As late even as five 
o'clock, the milkman in the quiet streets is a 
symbol and a mystery. By six o'clock he is a 
common purveyor. Contact with frowsy elevator 



116 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

boys and gaping grocer's clerks has vulgarized 
him. His interests are no longer in food, but in 
commerce. Instead of communing with the night, 
he is busy with a memorandum book and a lead 
pencil. 

In the full dawn the acetylene flares over the 
excavation pits have gone out. The dazzling arc 
lights in the Baltimore and Hartford Lunches 
are out. The street cars, running on shorter 
schedules, have taken on their daylight screech 
and clangor. The conductor is fast sinking into 
daylight surliness. The huge bundles of news- 
papers which at night and in bulk have the merit 
of a really great commodity, the dignity almost 
of a bag of meal or a crate of eggs, are now re- 
solved into units on the stationers' stands, and 
if the new day be Sunday the newsman is busy 
sorting out the twelve different sections of the 
Sunday paper and putting the comic section on 
top. Nor can I think of anything in human af- 
fairs which can be more futile in the eyes of a 
Creator than a stationer sorting out comic sup- 
plements in the full glory of early sunrise. With 
its newspaper waiting for it, New York of the 
ordinary life is ready to get out of bed. 



VI 

LAURELMERE 



Ten months in the year we sleep, eat, and re- 
ceive our friends in Belshazzar Court. But if 
home is where the heart is, our apartment stands 
vacant seven months of the twelve. With the 
first thrill of the March sunlight come dreams of 
the sea, green fields, the hills, and by the first 
week in April we are planning vacations. The 
spring rains sap and mine at the foundations of 
Belshazzar Court's superheated comfort. Like 
every one of the fifty-three other families who 
have been snuggling together against the winter, 
we feel less need of our neighbors as the days 
grow warmer and we yield to the gentle Welt- 
schmerz which seeks expression in real estate 
catalogues. The hallways in Belshazzar Court 
grow stuffy, the bedrooms shrink and darken, 
and stray conversation from across the court no 
longer wakens the response of human fellowship. 
117 



118 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

In winter Belshazzar Court is an admirable two 
minutes from the Subway, but in April I begin 
to feel that a ten minutes' walk to the train in the 
morning is just what my health requires. To get 
away, away — Weltschmerz, Wanderlust, or any 
other term of gentle, surging emotion the Kaiser's 
language is so rich in. We go in for real estate 
catalogues, time-tables, commutation fares, and the 
local distribution of malaria and mosquitoes in 
the northeastern United States. 

We go away in July. We come back in Sep- 
tember, but only in the body. It is another four 
weeks before Belshazzar Court becomes home 
again. The apartment shows traces of the paint- 
ers and the paper-hangers. The family wardrobe 
is in transit from trunks to closets. Emmeline 
haunts the employment offices. Harold must be 
fitted out for school. The bedroom distribution 
problem must be settled and cannot be properly 
settled until Harold's bed has been tried out in 
every sleeping-room and brought back to its orig- 
inal place. Not till some time in October does life 
fall back into the compact, steam-heated ways of 
Belshazzar Court. Not till then does the spirit 
rejoin the body and take up its old habitation. 
There ought to be such a thing as spiritual rent, 
payable only during those months when our souls 



LAURELMERE lip 

are at peace In Belshazzar Court. Nobody then 
would want to be a landlord and everyone would 
be happy. 

This summer we decided early against hotels 
and boarding-houses. Emmeline's nerves are not 
equipped for the strain of porch life. The chil- 
dren find the noise rather trying. And the vast 
amount of work which I plan for my summer va- 
cation and which regularly gets postponed to 
Christmas could not conceivably be carried on in 
hotel writing-rooms. We decided then that this 
summer it must be a place of our own in the 
country, though we would take our meals outside. 
It must be within commuting distance. When I 
must go back to the office I could still come out 
every night and so spare the children, who have 
grown used to having me all the time, the sharp 
pang of separation which they always experience 
on such occasions until I turn the corner. A 
place of our own at the shore, with trees and grass, 
with a porch, with first-class train service, and 
costing much less than a hotel would — that is all 
we asked. 

At Laurelmere-by-the-Sea we found everything 
we wanted — except the scale of expenditure, 
which naturally cannot be ascertained until ac- 
counts are checked up at the end of the summer. 



120 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

And we found it almost at the first venture. From 
the street the house looked but so-so. But at the 
back of the house, one flight up, there was a 
porch as large as our big bedroom in Belshazzar 
Court, screened from all observation by lattice- 
work, by thick matted vines, and a willow-tree, 
which stood sentinel guard right in the middle 
and brushed its lower branches against the porch 
railing. The porch looked down on a garden with 
hedges and over the trees there was a blue line on 
the horizon edged with white lace, which was the 
sea. As we stood there on the porch, and the 
renting agent was presumably wondering how 
much he could ask, there slid over the blue line of 
the sea a boat with white sails, with the rigid, 
swanlike motion of a stage boat propelled by a 
gang of expert scene shifters. I don't know 
whether the renting agent had a signal system by 
which a magic boat with white sails could be made 
to glide by just as a prospective tenant stepped 
out on the back porch. There was nothing more 
to be said. We rented the porch with its acces- 
sory rooms, and two weeks later we were in resi- 
dence at Laurelmere. It remained only to hire 
a bathhouse, a beach chair, and a yellow umbrella. 
Our vacation — and simultaneously my own vaca- 
tion from the office — ^began with a swing. 



LAURELMERE 121 

It is not my intention to give a formal account 
of our experience by the sea. For that matter 
any academic picture of a summer outing must be 
a failure. Fugitive impressions are best. I set 
down the following disjointed notes just as they 
were put to paper, with no attempt at system and 
elaboration : — 

Jvly llf,. 
Yesterday I tipped the bathhouse attendant 
and this morning I found a new man on our aisle. 
Last Saturday we tipped the grocer's boy and 
the afternoon of the same day he resigned. Last 
week I gave the waitress at the hotel a handsome 
fee to insure for ourselves the favored-nation 
treatment for an indefinite future, and the very 
next day Harold developed mumps and we have 
been taking our meals at home. On the subject 
of tips Emmeline disagrees with Machiavelli, who 
says that men are actuated by the expectation 
of favors to come rather than by gratitude for 
favors in the past. Emmeline says always tip in 
advance; but the facts are against her. 

My experience with waiters, janitors, and bath- 
house attendants has always been the same. Why 
do they resign after a generous gratuity? It 
cannot be that they take it as an insult. Some- 



122 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

times I have suspected that they resign in order 
to give someone else a chance at me. Or else my 
tip just rounds out the amount of capital on 
which they can afford to retire or go into busi- 
ness for themselves. Perhaps, again, it is only 
the Wanderlust which is so strong in the servitor 
class. The man at the bathing pavilion is still in 
business three aisles further on, and the grocer's 
boy is working for another grocer half a block 
away. It would be an interesting experiment to 
follow up a grocer's boy or a janitor who resigns 
after being tipped. We could transfer our mar- 
keting or our living-quarters to the place of his 
new employment, and so doggedly pursue him 
with tips until he turned upon us in desperation, 
declaring millions for defense, but not a cent for 
tribute. At any rate, here is a suggestion I throw 
out for the psychologists. Whenever you en- 
counter a problem that is too difficult or of no 
particular importance, throw it out as a sugges- 
tion for someone else to work out. 

J% 16. 
The theatrical season here is in full blast. Our 
taste runs strongly to the educational drama. At 
the Bijou we have Dolly Devereux and her Red- 
head Aeroplane Girls. At the Twentieth Cen- 



LAURELMERE US 

tury we have a white-slave film in four reels, with 
a condensed version in two reels at the half-price 
afternoon performances for children. Our stock 
company is drawing crowded houses to The Lure, 
which the dramatic reviewer on the local weekly 
has aptly characterized as the most soul-racking 
drama ever written for the purposes of a refined 
evening's entertainment. There is obviously no 
reason why people spending their holidays on this 
unequaled section of the Atlantic Coast should be 
allowed to forget the grimmer aspects of life. As 
the reviewer for the local paper cleverly remarks, 
the sense of human fellowship is as strong on Long 
Island as in the White Mountains or the Maine 
woods. On this point it is instructive to listen to 
comments from the audience as it leaves the 
theater after a performance of this pioneer edu- 
cational drama of the Underworld: 

" It was chilly, but once you got into the water 
it was awfully warm. The sea, you know, is al- 
ways warmer than the air." 

" Isn't it terrible that such things should be 
allowed?" 

" I prefer a voile ; it doesn't wrinkle." 

The Wednesday matinees are well attended. As 
the dramatic reviewer for our paper observes, 
after a performance of The Lure, the visitor will 



124 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

find a dip in the sea a delightful way of rounding 
out the afternoon and preparing for dinner. 

July 17. 

People dance a great deal, afternoons and eve- 
nings. A friend here who is always interested in 
the reason of things says it is the war. If the 
war had lasted another two years, he thinks, we 
should now be dancing mornings as well. But 
when I remind him that people danced a great 
deal before the war he replies, Yes, but they 
did not dance anywhere so close. Perhaps, by his 
reasoning, it is because during more than four 
years the trenches in France were so close to each 
other. Sometimes No Man's Land in France was 
only a few feet wide. But between dancing part- 
ners here there is No Man's Land. But 
that is not the point. The point is that we 
should be more careful about blaming a sprawly 
war for our present sprawly dancing and sprawly 
literature. We had that kind of dancing and liter- 
ature for several years before the war and perhaps 
they made the war instead of the war them. 

In the drug stores there are stamp machines 
which seU four penny stamps for a nickel. I 
don't know who makes the profit, the Government, 
the patentee of the machine, or the storekeeper. 



LAURELMERE 125 

But a superprofit of twenty-five per cent, strikes 
me as exorbitant. Doesn't this reveal the secret 
of the high cost of living? Say that the average 
young woman on her vacation sends out fifty pic- 
ture postcards a day; that represents an excess 
charge of twelve and a half cents a day, or one 
dollar and seventy-five cents during the fortnight. 
This considerable saving could be effected by 
buying stamps in large quantities at the post 
office, say in sheets of one hundred. All one has 
to do then, when a postcard is to be mailed, is to 
turn out every drawer in one's room and sundry 
pockets. With some care the stamps can be glued 
apart and they are practically as good as new. 

July 19, 
Harold has not been bathing as yet on account 
of the rain and the mumps. While his face was 
still badly swollen he prayed to be allowed to go 
swimming in the rain, but was persuaded not to. 
He contented himself with describing the prodig- 
ious feats he would accomplish in the surf, 
though I extracted from him the promise that he 
would not venture beyond the lifelines. Since the 
swelling on his cheek has subsided and the warm 
weather has come in Harold has been reticent on 
the subject of the water and prefers to play tennis 



126 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

in the back garden. Once or twice he has asked 
whether it is essential to get one's hair wet when 
bathing. 

July W. 

The number of young men this summer is be- 
low the ordinary level. A fair estimate of the 
crop would be 2.3 per cent, as against an average 
of 4.5 per cent, for the preceding ten years ; this 
not only in spite of but because of the heavy 
rains. Where the young men appear they are im- 
mediately taken up. Two young men arrived at 
the hotel across the street, one morning about 
ten. At 12.15 they were carrying sand cushions 
and wraps for two extremely attractive school 
teachers from Brooklyn. I don't know whether 
the scarcity of young men is due to the prevailing 
economic depression or whether it is the familiar 
phenomenon bewailed by young women at the 
shore that young men this year go to the moun- 
tains, and by young women in the mountains that 
young men go to the shore. This does not explain 
everything, as it would apparently leave the young 
men in a condition like Mohammed's coffin sus- 
pended between the mountains and the sea. 

One result of the scarcity of young men is a 
corresponding increase in the hauteur of the life- 



LAURELMERE 127 

guards. Whereas in ordinary years one of these 
semi-nude Apollos will pose an average of ten 
minutes with folded arms and corrugated brows 
bent upon the sea, this year by actual timing they 
will pose twenty minutes at a stretch. 

July 2S, 
In a reclining arm-chair under a large umbrella 
at the edge of the sea, Bernard Shaw's last volume 
of plays is ideal. When you pick up Methuselah, 
with a preface on something or other, and look 
across to where the outer bar is just covered 
with a filmy lacework of foam, you realize for the 
first time that summer reading is not a question 
of heavy books or light books, but whether the 
pages are cut or not. For a man in the very front 
rank of advanced thought Bernard Shaw reveals 
one striking reactionary trait: his books cannot 
be read without a paper-cutter. Yet even in his 
old-fashioned survivals Shaw is himself. The 
pages of Methuselah are not pasted at the top, 
or at the top and side, as they used to be in Vic- 
torian days, but exclusively at the bottom. To a 
true Shavian there may be an inner meaning in 
this peculiarity of the binder's art. A true 
Shavian will not grudge the extra effort of slicing 
open the pages, even if one has to borrow a child's 



128 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

sand spade for the purpose. But one who is not 
completely of the faith sometimes shrinks from 
the task. 

Especially if he looks up and finds the outer 
bar completely submerged and the waves lapping 
nearer on the sands. There is no breeze. There 
is no swell in the channel between the main shore 
and the reef, and diminutive sailing craft with 
lowered canvas glide by under motor power. An 
army under yellow and green umbrellas is en- 
camped on the sands. Regiments of engineers- 
ranging in age from three to seven are throwing 
up elaborate fortifications and planting the na- 
tional banner on the escarpment. Regiments of 
sappers and miners drive tunnels under these for- 
tifications and are frequently buried under the 
ruins. The younger engineers, say from three to 
Rve, have a curious habit of neglecting the mate- 
rial on the spot and fetching their sand from a 
distance of twenty feet between their fingers. I 
don't know why, but they make one think of Shaw. 
You pick up the volume on your knee. 

And then it occurs to you that in order to do 
justice to Methuselah, is it absolutely necessary 
to cut the pages? For one thing you may hold 
the uncut pages apart at the top with two fingers 
and peer down. It is rather a strain on the eyes. 



LAURELMERE 129 

but it can be done. I have done it several times, 
and it struck me that it may have all been inten- 
tional on Shaw's part. With superb confidence 
he set himself to testing the devotion of his ad- 
mirers, and his own power to interest. In that 
drowsy air, with the warm sun on the sands and 
the orchestral murmur of the incoming waters, 
what other writer of our day would dare impose 
upon his readers the alternative of getting out 
of the chair and borrowing a shovel, or holding 
the pages apart with two fingers and peering 
down.? The latter process is difficult. Halfway 
down the page you are buried, eyes, nose, and 
chin, between the pages, and the lines toward the 
bottom of the page necessitate a combined down- 
ward and side thrust of the head which is both un- 
aesthetic and bad for the muscles of the neck. The 
gray-blue of the water, the sunlight shimmering 
through the yellow umbrella covering, the great 
peace of the shore, come home to you with pecu- 
liar force after you have extracted your face from 
between the pages of MetJmselah, and let your 
neck sway back to the perpendicular. 

But why peep? Bernard Shaw's supreme quali- 
fication for summer reading lies precisely in the 
fact that it is neither necessary to cut his pages 
nor peer between them. Sometimes I do neither, 



130 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

And I find that I have grasped Shaw's message as 
clearly in this book as I have done in any of his 
books with a paper-knife at hand. His wit, his 
paradox, his sudden and brilliant generalization, 
carry me over the gulf of a couple of untouched 
pages without the least sense of traveling through 
empty space. There can be no feeling of jar in 
passing from page 29 to page S2 in Shaw's dia- 
logue, because the person who is speaking at the 
bottom of page 29 and the person who is speaking 
at the top of page 32 have no perceptible human 
difference. Actually I can recall that some of 
the most illuminating truths in Bernard Shaw have 
come to me just in this way — ^by turning un- 
knowingly from page 29 to page 32. 

Clouds are masking the sun and turning the 
gray-blue of the water into steel gray and dull 
lead. A breeze has sprung up and it frets the 
surface of the channel. Diminutive catboats 
throw up sail and glide by no longer on an even 
keel. Engineers, sappers, and miners are being 
huddled into baby carts and dragged off protest- 
ing to lunch. The life-guard, gray woolen 
sweater and brown slim legs, looks more than ever 
the Superman. Here's the book again. 

It must be the secret of the entire contem- 
porary school of paradox, of whimsy, of individ- 



LAURELMERE ISl 

ualistic standards in literature, that it appeals to 
a time-saving age bj creating books that can be 
read without cutting the pages. For instance, 
when the book reviewer says of a book that it con- 
tradicts itself, but so does life contradict itself; 
that the author does not prove his point, but 
Nature never bothers about demonstrating any- 
thing; that his grammar is a bit rough, but so was 
Shakespeare's^ — when a reviewer says all this of 
an author it is obvious that this author can afford 
to have his pages pasted in couples or in fours. 
He will be just as consecutive as ever. Such an 
author may be read the way old textbooks were 
intended to be read, with the big type for every- 
one, with footnotes in smaller type for the closer 
student, with appendices for the specialist. For 
the extremely frivolous reader, Bernard Shaw 
might come pasted eight pages together; for the 
more serious reader like myself, two together, and 
so on. 

The idea fascinates me. I imagine myself be- 
ginning a new play of Shaw's by reading every 
eighth page, and returning for a closer grapple 
with his meaning on every fourth page, and so on 
till all the pages were cut. I imagine myself writ- 
ing a little essay in appreciation of Fanny's First 
Flay based on this kind of research. I call up a 



182 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

picture of the Shaw of pages 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, etc., a 
fierce, mocking, biting spirit at war with the world 
as it is to-day, and then I compare it with the 
Shaw of pages 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, etc., a shrewd, 
practical student of human nature, keenly aware 
of its limitations, and generous to our human 
frailties. The combinations are infinite. One 
can always compare the Shaw of pages 1, 3, 4, 7, 
8, 9, 12, 16, with the Shaw of pages 2, 3, 4, 6, 9, 
13, 14, 15. By refusing to make use of a paper- 
cutter I could wring out the very heart of Shaw's 
secret here in this chair by the edge of the sea. 

n 
Wilbur P. Birdwood is a name far less cele- 
brated in the annals of authorship than Bernard 
Shaw, but I am free to confess that Methuselah 
gave me nothing like the delight and instruction I 
have derived from Birdwood's latest contribution 
to applied Freudianism, Sex-Elements in the First 
Five Boohs of Euclid, (New York: Wilkins & Mac- 
Nab, $4.50 net; postage 18 cents). Even if it 
were my intention to give a complete sum- 
mary of Birdwood's account of the unconscious 
love-life of the great Greek geometer, the weather, 
which has been sultry and oppressive, would 
make the thing impossible. Birdwood's subject 



LAURELMERE 133 

is fairly narrow^ but within its limits he delves deep, 
as the publishers' net price and the charge for trans- 
mission through the mails would indicate. I shall 
therefore content myself with the very briefest out- 
line of his thesis. 

Mr. Birdwood tells us in his preface that he was 
impelled to a psycho-analytic investigation of Euclid 
by the promise of an exceptionally rich sex-content 
which earlier students seem oddly to have overlooked. 
In no writer of ancient or modern times, with the pos- 
sible exception of Legendre and Wentworth & Smith, 
does the theme of the eternal triangle run so per- 
sistently as in the pages of Euclid, and particularly 
Book I, Propositions 4 to 26 inclusive. In the later 
books Euclid evidently makes a desperate attempt to 
break away from the obsession of the triangle, an 
obsession obviously arising out of a profound attach- 
ment developed by the geometer at the age of two for 
his grandmother on the father's side, who never came 
to visit the child without a bagful of honey-cakes and 
dried sunflower seeds, of which the little Euclid was 
inordinately fond. 

I have said that the great geometer tried hard to 
rid himself of this haunting Triangle Complex. He 
took refuge in parallel lines, in quadrilaterals and 
the higher polygons, in circles of various diameters. 
He never succeeded. Regularly the two paralled lines 



134 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

transversed by a third line would bring into being 
new triangles with their vertical angles equal. The 
quadrilateral would resolve itself into two triangles 
with the same total amount of base line and altitude. 
And the circle, symbol of a completely rounded exist- 
ence liberated from all debilitating psychoses, became 
to Euclid only an enlarged obsession. Continually he 
would be circumscribing the circle of life around the 
triangle of sex, or inscribing the circle of life within 
the triangle of sex. He would start out blithely from 
the centre of the circle of life at A, move along the 
radii to the circumference of existence at B and C, and 
before he was aware of it he had drawn a chord 
BC connecting the two radii, and producing ABC — 
a triangle! 

'And more than that/ says Birdwood. 'Frequently 
we find Euclid under the inner necessity of determin- 
ing the shortest distance from the centre of his circle 
to the base of his sex-triangle. Euclid called it the 
perpendicular, but to us it is plainly the sex- 
transmutation of the bee-line which the infant 
Euclid would make for his grandmother under the 
spur of the CEdipus Complex, the honey-cakes, and 
the dried sunflower seeds.* 

Such were the general memories of Euclid which 
impelled Birdwood to undertake an intensive exam- 
ination of the Elements of Geometry, with Solutions 



LAURELMERE 136 

for Teachers Only. But as a preliminary to the 
investigation of Euclid's works it was essential, 
naturally, to study the facts of Euclid's life,. in order 
to establish the connection between the geometer's 
psychic eruptions, inhibitions, and permanent suppres- 
sions on the one hand, and the Axioms, Definitions, 
Postulates, Problems, and Theorems on the other. 

Now what do we know of the principal events in 
the life of Euclid, our author asked himself. The 
answer was. Not a thing. As that admirable text- 
book of pre-Freudian science, the Encyclopoedia 
Britannica has it, 'We are ignorant not only of the 
dates of his birth and his death, but also of his parent- 
age, his teachers, and the residence of his early years.* 
The Britannica is an expensive publication, but, as 
Birdwood remarks, even at two or three times the 
price it could not have put the case about Euclid's 
life more completely. 

'With this as a basis,' continues Birdwood, 'are 
we not justified in filling in the sketch until the entire 
career of the great geometer rises vividly before us? 
We see him bom on the island of Cos in the early 
summer of 342 b.c. — which fact, incidentally, makes 
it hard to understand why he should have been so 
frequently confounded with another Euclid, who was 
bom m Boeotia six hundred years earlier and who 
attained fame as a wholesale cattle-dealer. He was 



136 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

born of a native mother, probably a member of the 
ruling family of the Delta Upsilons. His father was 
a trader from Crete who, on one of his voyages, pre- 
sumably in the open winter of 344 B.C., was ship- 
wrecked on the coast of Cos, but succeeded in making 
his way to land carrying his mother on his shoulders. 
This we must assume, since we have seen that our 
interpretation of the later career of Euclid demands 
the intimate association of a paternal grandmother. 

'The boy grew up fair-haired, large for his years, 
but with a slight stammer which frequently accentu- 
ated his nervous reaction in the presence of the afore- 
said honey-cakes. Except for the Grandmother 
Complex of which we catch a startling glimpse in 
Proposition 18, "The greater side of any triangle has 
the greater angle opposite to it," the boy's life was 
one of more than normal happiness. It naturally 
would be. The study of Greek came easily to him, 
and Latin, Modern History, Manual Training — and 
Geometry, of course — had not yet been invented. 
When the boy was six years old, his father perished 
in a raid upon the island of Cos by the Phi Beta 
Kappas, a pirate tribe inhabiting the adjoining main- 
land. His mother was carried off into captivity, but 
the lad and his grandmother were left behind as of 
doubtful commercial value. Thus the early Complex 
between the two was strengthened in the course of 



LAURELMERE 137 

the next three years; for when the boy was nine 
years of age the old lady died, but not without leaving 
a profound impress on the future Proposition 16, "If 
one side of a triangle be produced, the exterior angle 
is greater than either of the interior opposite 
angles." 

Concerning the attachment between the lad and his 
grandmother, — altogether unnatural from the stand- 
point of present-day psycho-analysis, — ^the historian 
Archilongus has preserved the following legend. To 
the end of his life, — and Euclid lived to be seventy- 
six years, eight months and odd days old, — the famous 
geometer, on the anniversary of his grandmother's 
death, would refuse to meet his students, array him- 
self in a purple robe, comb his beard with special care, 
sacrifice to Hermes Mathematikos, partake of no food 
whatever, and give himself up to contemplation. To 
his favorite disciple, when he questioned him on the 
subject, Euclid explained that he devoted that day to 
evoking the memory of the aged woman who, after he 
had lost his mother, would go out every sundown into 
the olive groves to pick kindling for a fire, and rock 
the boy to sleep on her lap before the hearth. Such an 
exhibition by an old man of three score and ten can 
be explained on no other ground than a recurrence 
of the CEdipus Complex. 



138 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

We are now in a position to follow the detail of 
Birdwood's method, as applied to what is perhaps the 
best known of Euclid's literary productions: 

If two triangles have two sides of the one equal to 
two sides of the other, each to each, and have also the 
angles contained hy those sides equal to one another, 
they also have their bases or third sides equal; and 
the two triangles are equal; and their other angles are 
equal, each to each, namely, those to which the equal 
sides are opposite, 

JL A' 



B'' 



C ^" 

Euclid's demonstration is a model of condensed, if 
somewhat dictatorial, literary expression. He says,^ 
virtually : — 

In the above triangles let the line AB be equal to 
A'B', and the line AC to the line A'C, and the 
angle BAC to the angle B'A'C; then will the line 
BC be equal to the line B'C and the two triangles 
will be equal in every respect. 

For, superimpose the second triangle on the first. 
Then will the line A'B' coincide with AB and the 
point B' will fall on point B. But since the angle 





LAURELMERE 139 

B'A'C is equal to the angle BAG, the line A'C will 
take the direction of the line AC, and point C will 
coincide with point C. 

Now, if point B' coincides with B and point C 
with C, the line B'C must coincide with the line BC 
and the two triangles are equal in every respect. 
Q. E. D. 

But what happens if we bring psycho-analysis to 
bear on the proposition? 

Let us suppose, argues Birdwood, that the tri- 
angle ABC represents the infant Euclid's unconscious 
and exaggerated emotional reactions to his grand- 
mother, and the triangle A'BX' is the resultant 
emotional expression of his later life. In the infant 
triangle, ABC, point A would be the child Euclid 
catching sight of his grandmother coming in with the 
honey-cakes at the front door B, or with the sunflower 
seeds through the back garden C. Then the line BC 
would represent the locus or base of the child's 
inordinate appetite. 

What follows is simple. In the adult sex-triangle 
A'B'C, the aged Euclid sets out from the same point, 
A', himself, and goes on thinking along the line A'B' 
until the ancient inhibition brings him to stop at B', 
the honey-cakes. Or, if he starts out in another direc- 
tion, the permanent angle given to his infant soul by 
his grandmother impels hipa along the line A'C till 



140 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

the same inhibition brings him to a stop at the point 
C, the dried sunflower seeds. Thus the line A'C, 
representing the sex life of a mature scientist, is 
predetermined along the old honey-cake-dried-sun- 
flower-seed line, AC. Euclid, of course, thought he 
was inventing Geometry. Actually he was rehearsing 
a vivid anxiety-dream of his childhood. 

And all through the books of Euclid, when we find 
it demonstrated that ABCDXWJZ is equal in every 
respect to A'B'C'D'X'W'J'Z', we are only in the 
presence of a phenomenon technically described, for 
obvious reasons, as the Przemysl Complex. 

I have cited but a single theorem to illustrate the 
infinite concentration and the sympathetic insight 
which Birdwood has brought to the study of Euclid 
the Elemental Amorist. In order to seize the full 
sweep of the argument, the reader must be referred 
to the book itself. He will there find the analysis 
of Euclid's other preoccupations. There are, for 
example, the straight lines that never meet, so aptly 
characterized by the author as the 'deadly parallel,' 
and traced back without difHculty to the long walks 
which the infant Euclid used to take with his grand- 
mother, hand in hand. A separate chapter is devoted 
to the bisection, or, as our author prefers to call it, 
the bisexualizing, of angles; resulting, not as Euclid 



LAURELMERE ill 

puts it, into two equal halves, but in a better half 
and the other kind. From whatever angle Birdwood 
approaches the subject, acutely, or obtusely, or just 
perpendicularly, the sex-predominance at once leaps 
forth. 

Another chapter has to do with the triangle having 
two of its sides equal, commonly known as an isosceles, 
triangle, but by Birdwood described as the homosexual 
triangle. 

Nor need I do more than make the briefest refer- 
ence to our author's analysis of the connection between 
Euclid's infant day-dreams and the highly personal 
Euclidean literary style. Given a childhood full of 
suppressions, and it is easy to understand the sharp 
kick-back in later years to a dogmatic, finger-pointing 
literary manner, with its Xet this be A and B,* or 
'Draw a line from C to D,* its *nows* and 'thens' 
and 'therefores' and 'Q. E. D.*s/ Our author has 
confined himself to the first five books of Euclid, but 
he pauses a moment to point out what rich fields of 
study lie in the later books. *If,* he says, 'in the 
Euclidean Plane Geometry we find the transfigure- 
ment of a child's day-dreams, in the Solid Geometry 
we enter the domain of nightmare.* 

No appraisal of Birdwood's contribution to the sum 



142 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

of human knowledge would be complete without a 
few words on Part III of his book, which deals 
exclusively with Euclid, Book I, Proposition 5, 'If 
two sides of a triangle are equal, then the angles 
opposite these sides are equal/ In the history of 
mathematics, this celebrated Proposition has come to 
be known as the Pons Asinorum, the Bridge of Asses, 
and the common explanation has been that at this 
point in the development of the Euclidean geometry, 
the dull-witted scholar usually balks and cannot or 
will not cross. 

This matter-of-fact interpretation is rejected out 
of hand by our author. He finds instead that both 
the thing described, namely the triangle with two 
equal sides, and the descriptive epithet, the Bridge 
of Asses, are rich in sex-significance. He proceeds 
to show that both Bridge and Ass have always borne 
an esoteric connotation, if you know what I mean. 
The Bridge has obvious reference to the transi- 
tion period from childhood to early adolescence, 
coinciding with the eighth grade in the elementary 
school and the first semester in high school, at which 
time the modern school-child passes from the con- 
sideration of arithmetical square root, ratio and pro- 
portion, and practical problems in cemeting floors and 
papering walls at so much a square yard (excluding 



LAURELMERE 143 

the windows) J to the first principles of Euclid. The 
Pons Asinorum would thus fall very near the period 
in which childhood, passing into youth, is filled with 
the vague hesitations and perplexities to which 
psycho-analysis has given us the key. Birdwood finds 
the same meaning in 'The Bridge of Sighs/ and *I 
Stood on the Bridge at Midnight/ with which children 
at this stage are in the habit of afflicting their elders ; 
but he refuses to go with the extremists who discern 
the same significance in the much earlier 'London 
Bridge is Falling Down.* 

As for the Ass, that familiar animal has in all ages 
and all climes been the symbol of eroticism, together 
with the Bird, the Cat, the Donkey, the Eagle, the 
Fur-bearing Seal, the Giraffe, the Hyena, the Irra- 
waddy Woodpecker, the Jaguar, the Kangaroo, the 
Llama, the Mesopotamian Fishhawk, the Narghili, the 
Ox, the Penguin, the Quadriga, the Rhinoceros, the 
Swan, the Tourniquet, the Uganda, the Vituperative 
Buzzard, the Weasel, the Xingu, the Yuban, and the 
Zebra. 

From this general consideration our author goes on 
to an examination of a number of the most famous 
erotic Asses in history. Out of a long list we can 
quote only two: Balaam's Ass and the celebrated Ass 
of Buridan. In the earlier case the Biblical student 



144 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

will recall how the Ass, representing primitive 
instinct, was immediately aware of the angel blocking 
the road, while its rider Balaam, representing con- 
scious pride of intellect, remained in dangerous ignor- 
ance. First the Ass turned aside into a field, then 
it crushed Balaam's foot against the wall^ then it fell 
prostrate in the road. Meanwhile, Balaam with his 
heavy staff was cruelly engaged in repressing the 
Ass's desires, until the inevitable neurotic discharge 
occurred: the mouth of the Ass was opened, and it 
addressed its master in a few well-chosen words with 
which we are not particularly concerned. The signifi- 
cant fact is that the Ass did break into speech. 

There is a difference of opinion whether the cele- 
brated French philosopher Buridan actually did make 
use of the famous parable of the Ass, or whether 
the Ass was, so to speak, saddled on him by his 
enemies. At any rate, Buridan is supposed to have 
illustrated the paralysis of the human will when con- 
fronted with two equally powerful motives by the 
example of an Ass permanently immobilized between 
two equidistant bales of hay. Birdwood asserts 
that this story of an Ass dying of hunger without 
choosing either bale of hay is beyond doubt the most 
extraordinary case of repressed desire on record. 
But he takes the death of the animal only in a sym- 



LAURELMERE 145 

bolic sense. His own belief is that the prolonged 
inhibition must have ultimately resolved itself into 
a neurosis^ though he does not venture to say what 
particular form the nervous discharge assumed. 
Probably the Ass wrote a book. 



VII 

SCHOOL 

Illness broke in upon the beginning of Harold's 
academic career. He did not get fairly under 
way until he was seven years and over. That was 
not so long ago but that we can easily recall the 
warm flush of pride with which we received formal 
notification that our son Harold had passed his 
Entrance Examinations for the Second Grade and 
was now qualified to take up the reading of ordi- 
nary numerals to 1000 and Roman numerals to 
XX, with addition through 9's, and the multipli- 
cation table to 5x9, not to mention objective 
work in simple fractions and problems. The no- 
tion of Harold's " entrance examinations " amused 
Emmeline intensely. At least she took occasion 
during the next two weeks to read the certificate 
out aloud to visitors, laughing almost spontane- 
ously. But when visitors were not about she 
would sometimes pull out the printed card and 
look at it thoughtfully, still smiling, but with 
no evident signs of hilarity. She said that mom- 

146 



SCHOOL 147 

ings, after nine, it was very quiet in the house 
nowadays. It was delightful but strange. 

If school brought any spiritual crisis to Harold 
he gave no sign of it. An extraordinary calm in 
the face of exceptional circumstances is one of 
the traits I envy him. Possibly this may be be- 
cause nobody or nothing that presents itself to 
him from the outside can ever approach in interest 
the things that are going on inside of him. He 
will be shy before strangers, but I am inclined to 
think that the Dalai Lama of Tibet would leave 
him unruffled. Kings and Emperors have a 
logical place in Harold's world of ideas, whereas 
an ordinary visitor in the house needs to have his 
presence explained. 

Harold's self-possession was shown in the man- 
ner he conducted himself during his entrance ex- 
aminations. The questions were oral. He had 
just been asked to name the days of the week 
when he observed that one of his shoe-laces had 
come loose. He stooped, adjusted his shoe-lace, 
and gave the days of the week correctly. The 
operation on his shoe was not completed when he 
was asked how much is three and four. He 
solved the problem while still in a semicircular 
position. When Emmeline heard of his behavior 
during the test she was in despair. She foresaw 



148 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

the blasting of Harold's educational career at the 
very start. She was of a mind to call up the 
school authorities and let them know that the boy 
did not usually answer questions from the vicinity 
of his shoe tops, and that probably it was nervous- 
ness. But the school authorities evidently knew 
better. They must have discerned in Harold an 
equanimity of the soul, a Spartan calm, which it 
is one of the main purposes of pedagogy to de- 
velop. 

Harold's self-possession is never more conspicu- 
ous than during the two hours that intervene be- 
tween his getting out of bed and his departure 
for school. The flight of time does not exist for 
him. He goes about his toilet with exquisite de- 
liberation. If anything, he dresses and washes 
with greater leisureliness from Monday to Friday 
than he does the other two days of the week. It 
is not an aversion for learning. It is not even 
indifference. Harold does not creep to school. 
He goes cheerfully when we tell him that he is 
ready to go. But while the business of getting 
him ready is under way he views the process ob- 
jectively. It is as if some strange little boy were 
being washed and combed and urged through his 
breakfast until the moment when everything be- 
ing done, the spirit of himself, Harold, enters 



SCHOOL 149 

that alien body and propels it to school. As sail- 
ing-master of his soul it is not for him to bother 
with loading the cargo and battening down the 
hatches. Only when the hawsers are ready to be 
cast off — it is ten minutes of nine and Emmeline's 
nerves are on edge — does the master ascend the 
bridge. Once outside the door he makes excellent 
speed. I have warned Harold repeatedly, but he 
always trots instead of walking, and his manner 
of crossing the avenue gives us some anxiety on 
account of the cars and automobiles. 

Sometimes I think that Emmeline and I assume 
the wrong attitude toward Harold's deliberate 
ways between seven and nine in the morning. In 
our behalf it must be said, of course, that getting 
a boy washed and dressed and fed with only two 
hours to do it in is a task that calls for expedi- 
tion. But in our anxiety to get Harold off to 
school in time we are sometimes tempted to over- 
look the boy's extraordinary spiritual activity 
during these two hours. It is then that the events 
of the preceding day pass in swift procession 
through his mind. At table the night before 
Harold has been silent as usual and apparently 
indifferent to the conversation. As it turns out, 
my remarks on the European situation have been 
caught and registered for fuller investigation. At 



150 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

the dinner-table he is too busy balancing the books 
of his own daily concerns. In the morning he is a 
bottomless vessel of curiosity. In the morning, 
while brushing his teeth or over his egg cup, he 
will demand a detailed statement of the causes be- 
hind the great upheaval on the Continent. A 
stranger watching Harold in the act of pulling on 
his stockings might suppose that the boy is im- 
perfectly awake. But I know that his stockings 
get tangled up because he is pondering on the 
character and motives of Lloyd George and other 
problems which must be immediately referred to 
me who am busy before the shaving mirror. 

On such occasions I confess that I frequently 
dispose of the European situation with a display 
of summary authority which President Wilson 
would never tolerate in a Mexican dictator. Or 
else I describe the Kaiser in a few ill-chosen and 
inadequate phrases such as naturally suggest 
themselves to one in a hurry before the shaving 
mirror. Later I feel that we are unjust to the 
boy and neglectful of the educational opportuni- 
ties he affords us. If the secret of pedagogy is 
to find the moment when the child's mind is in its 
most receptive state, and feed it with the infor- 
mation which, at other times, involves effort to 
absorb, it seems a pity that at 7.30 in the morn- 



SCHOOL 151 

ing I should be busy with my razor. I have seldom 
encountered a human being so eager to be in- 
structed as Harold is at twenty minutes of nine 
with his glass of milk still before him. Some day 
an educational reformer will cut the ground from 
under the Froebelians and Tolstoyans and Mon- 
tessorians by devising a system of bedroom and 
bathroom and breakfast-table education. Under 
such a system all the instructor would have to do 
would be to follow the child about while he is get- 
ting ready for school and answer questions. Fif- 
teen minutes with Harold while he is lacing his 
shoes would give his instructor enough mental 
spontaneity and spiritual thirst to equip an entire 
classroom. 

Our knowledge of what happens to Harold at 
school between the hours of nine and one is frag- 
mentary. From the school syllabus we learn, of 
course, that besides being engaged upon the art 
of reading numbers up to 1000 and Roman num- 
erals to XX supplemented by the multiplication 
table as far as 5 x 9, Harold is being instructed 
in English Literature, in Language, in History 
beginning with Early Life on Manhattan, in Na- 
ture Study, in the Industrial and the Fine Arts, in 
Music and Physical Training. We have, too, oc- 
casional reports from the schoolroom regarding 



152 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

Harold's backwardness in concentration and pen- 
manship, as opposed to his proficiency in Lan- 
guage and History. Then there are the mothers' 
meetings. But such information is either too 
theoretical or too specific. Of the boy's mental 
growth in the round we have no way of judging 
except as he reveals himself spontaneously. 

And Harold reveals very little indeed. His 
school life falls from his shoulders the moment he 
steps out into the street. If there were no 
syllabuses, mothers' meetings, and occasional re- 
ports, and we were left to find out the nature of 
Harold's curriculum from what he offers to tell, 
our ideas would be even more fragmentary than 
they are. What we are compelled to do is to 
piece together stray remarks at table or while the 
boy is dressing or undressing, laconic bulletins 
delivered with no particular relevance, or else if 
relevant, uttered in a matter-of-fact tone, as hav- 
ing no very intimate relation to himself, much as 
I should throw out an item from the evening paper 
to fill out a blank in conversation. Only thus did 
I find out that Harold models in clay, that he sews 
his own Indian suit for the Commencement 
pageant, that he does practical gardening and 
folk dancing. I am not sure about basket-work 
and elementary wood-carving. We know that he 



SCHOOL 153 

writes because there has been some complaint about 
his lack of neatness, which his teacher is inclined to 
explain as arising from the broader defect of in- 
adequate attention. 

You must not suppose that Harold is an indif- 
ferent scholar in the sense of being a poor student 
or devoid of the sense of duty. Of his ambition I 
am not so sure. The fact remains that he passed 
his entrance examinations easily and that at the 
end of the year, in spite of a month's absence on 
account of measles, he was promoted into Grade 3. 
Harold is indifferent to the extent that he does 
not bring his school away with him as I bring my 
own work home with me, to worry over. Harold's 
reticence is partly due to his highly developed 
sense of the sanctity and sufficiency of his private 
thoughts. Partly it is due to the capacity of every 
child to live in the moment and let it drop from 
him when he passes on to the next interest, whether 
it be from school to lunch, or from lunch to play, 
or from play to supper. But on the whole I con- 
sider Harold's lack of conversation about school as 
in the highest sense a tribute to the efficiency of his 
teachers and as evidence that he is happy with 
them. School has fitted so well into his scheme 
of life, has been accepted by him as so much a 
matter of course, that he no more thinks it neces- 



\ 
\ 






154 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

sary to refer to school than he would to the fact 
that he has enjoyed his supper. 

In conversation at table Harold's teacher will 
come up quite frequentl3^ This shows that she 
is a factor in his life. The mention of Harold's 
teacher will sometimes irritate Emmeline because 
the boy is in the habit of citing teacher as an 
authority on elementary truths that Emmeline has 
been at much pains to inculcate. By way of noth- 
ing in particular — Harold's disclosures of his 
school life are nearly always by way of nothing in 
particular — he will declare that his teacher said 
that to bolt food without chewing is bad for the 
digestion. Inasmuch as Emmeline has devoted 
several years to training Harold in that important 
physiological principle, she is rather vexed that a 
single statement by teacher should have assumed 
an authority which prolonged instruction on her 
own part has failed to attain. Or there will be a 
somewhat harassing dispute as to whether it is 
time for Harold to go to bed. The next morning 
while pulling on his stockings Harold will declare 
— incidentally Harold is always in a mood, the 
morning after, to confess that he was in the wrong 
the night before — that his teacher said that 
boys who did not sleep enough had something 
happen to their chests and shoulders which pre- 



SCHOOL 155 

vented them from playing football when they grew 
up. I do not mean to say that teacher's word will 
count as against Emmeline's. But it hurts to have 
the boy look outside for sanctions to a code of be- 
havior in which he has been drilled at home. I 
imagine it is in such moments Emmeline feels the 
first pangs of a child's ingratitude. But it is a 
trait that has value and significance. When 
Harold, who has been drinking milk with his meals 
since infancy, observes that his teacher said that 
milk is good for children, it occurs to me that he 
is only experiencing that need of an external prop 
for useful habits which is at the basis of religion. 
Not that there is in Harold's attitude to his 
teacher anything of religious awe. She is simply 
the exponent of the laws of his environment, laws 
which the boy knows cannot be violated as so many 
of the laws enunciated at home, which are subject 
to suspension and modification. To every child, I 
imagine, school is the place where the rule prevails 
and home is the place where exceptions to the rule 
may be safely invoked. Here is the fallacy in so 
much modern speculation on parents and teachers 
which would confound the functions of the home 
and the school by injecting the rule of affection 
into the school and the rule of discipline into the 
home. If the home is to remain a little isle of 



156 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

peace for its members I fail to see why Harold 
should be less entitled than myself to invoke its 
asylum. If I find in the home a refuge against 
the hard competitive conditions of my business 
life, Harold should rightly find in the home a 
refuge against the fairly rigid rules without which 
school is inconceivable. I disagree with the prev- 
alent theory in not at all being sure that women 
who are mothers make the best teachers. And I 
am not sure that women who have taug:ht children 
in class make the best mothers. In the externals 
of method and discipline they may have the ad- 
vantage. But it is absurd to suppose that the 
principles which guide a woman in charge of the 
little community of the classroom are the rela- 
tions which should subsist between the mother and 
the handful of children of her own body. 

An exceedingly complex subject this question of 
the freedom of the child. I am not sure that I 
understand it. Neither am I sure that the militant 
advocates of the freedom of the child understand 
it. At any rate, in so many arguments on the 
rights of the child, I find a lurking argument for 
the rights of parents as against the child. Th^ 
great implication seems to be that the modern way 
for a mother to love her children is to have the 
teacher love them for her. The modern way to 



SCHOOL 157 

train the child is to deny him the indulgences 
which the child, as the victim of several tens of 
thousands of years of foolish practice, has learned 
to expect from his parents. The freedom of the 
child seems to demand that he shall not bother his 
parents. There must be discipline in the matter 
of a child's sitting up after supper to wait 
for father from the office. But he must be al- 
lowed the utmost freedom in learning to read num- 
bers up to 1000 and Roman numerals to XX. No 
fetters must be imposed upon Harold's personality 
when he is stud3ang the date of the discovery of 
America, but there are rigorous limitations on the 
number of minutes he is to frolic with me in bed 
or to interrupt me at the typewriter when I am 
engaged in rapping out copy that the world could 
spare much more easily than Harold's soul can 
spare a half hour of communion with me. 

Am I wrong in thinking of the reorganized child 
life a la Bernard Shaw as a scheme under which 
the schoolboy with shining face creeps unwillingly 
home and little girls do samplers saying " God 
bless our School"? Home — a phalanstery of in- 
dividuals, mature and immature, with sharply de- 
fined rules against mutual intrusion. School — a 
place with no rules of conduct save those working 
secretly, an anarchy saved from chaos by a con- 



158 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

cealed benevolent despotism a la Montessori. The 
advanced child culturists puzzle me. In life they 
simply adore self-assertion in the face of adverse 
circumstances. In life they believe that character- 
building is attained by knocking one's head against 
environment, and love for liberty is nourished only 
under despotism. Why not apply the same logic 
to the child in school? What sort of mental and 
moral fiber is developed by having the child in 
conflict with nothing in particular? How can 
anyone, child or adult, revolt against the mush 
of the super-Froebelian, super-Montessorian meth- 
ods of pedagogical non-resistance? 

I should be more vehement against the compli- 
cated and expensive machinery of Montessorians 
and other superpedagogues if I thought their 
methods really as efficacious as people would have 
me believe. I should then protest against the re- 
finements of an educational system which is within 
the reach only of the privileged few. I am enough 
of a demagogue to grow angry at the thought of 
all those beautifully balanced systems of peda- 
gogy, of education by music and the dance and 
rhythmic physical development which demand elab- 
orate plants, expensive teachers, and a leisureli- 
ness which the State and the city can never supply 
to the children of the masses. If I were a revolu- 



SCHOOL 159 

tionist of the sanguine type I should be content to 
make education difficult and expensive and then 
insist that all children have it. But I am not a 
revolutionary optimist, and until the modern State 
is prepared to spend on its schools fifty times as 
much as it does to-day, I resent the tendency 
toward a double system of education, one of joy- 
ous and harmonic development for the children of 
the rich and one of mechanical routine and hard 
practicality for the other nine children out of ten. 
That is, I don't resent it. What I mean is that 
I should resent it if the efficacy of the costly mod- 
em systems were really superior to the ready- 
made store-clothes education offered to the chil- 
dren of the democracy. The expensive educa- 
tional systems are not a cause but an effect. Any 
system adopted by the rich for the education of 
their children will result in the bringing up of 
sanguine, self-assertive, harmoniously developed 
thoroughbreds. As between the graduate of the 
Eurythmic schools of Jacques Dalcroze and the 
graduate of Public School number 55, Manhattan, 
I admit that the Eurythmic child will come much 
nearer to the Hellenic ideal of free-stepping, 
graceful, masterful individuality. But it is not 
Montessori and Dalcroze that make the child of 
the income-tax-paying classes a Superchild. It 



160 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

is the habit of paying income tax that produces 
Superchildren. The mediaeval methods of Eton 
and Harrow have been turning out precisely the 
ideal product in the shape of the English gentle- 
man if poise, a rich appetite, and the assumption 
of one's own supreme worth are what you are 
striving for. 

I am enough of a demagogue to have been 
rather cast down when it was decided to send 
Harold to a private school. There were reasons 
enough. The boy's health, upon experiment, was 
not equal to the strain of a school day from nine 
till three in the afternoon (actually Harold's 
school day began at eight in the morning because 
of the part-time system enforced by the over- 
crowding of the classes, which Montessori will 
have to take into consideration). Harold's day 
now is from nine o'clock till one, with a brief re- 
cess for play and an intermission for lunch if 
desired. And a schedule which includes physical 
training, nature study, clay modeling, basket 
weaving, and pageant rehearsals seems in no 
danger of overtaxing the child's mind. (Once 
more I fall victim to my antiquated prejudices, 
when I imply that modeling in clay and sewing In- 
dian costumes do not involve a strain on the 
mind. I know that the newer psychology and the 



SCHOOL 161 

newer pedagogy have shown that there is more 
cerebration involved in cutting out paper pat- 
terns than in memorizing the multiplication table. 
But I am a slave to the old vocabulary. The 
reader forewarned will make the proper deduc- 
tions.) 

Nevertheless I did feel a pang at separating 
Harold from the public school. Emmeline laughed 
and asked whether I was afraid that Harold would 
turn out a snob. Perhaps I was a bit afraid of 
that, but at bottom it was not fear that Harold 
would go to the bad in his private school, but that 
he would do very well there. In other words, it 
was the feeling I have just expressed, whether it 
was fair that Harold should be put into the way 
of having a very delightful time at school, with 
easy hours under splendid hygienic conditions and 
work reduced largely to play, while so many of 
the boys he plays with cannot afford these advan- 
tages. That is, not advantages. As I have said, 
Harold will probably get no more out of his small 
carefully-guarded classes than the other children 
will get out of the overcrowded classes in the pub- 
lic school. But as a sign of social inequality the 
thing offended me. If you will, you may call this 
a gospel of envy. But in my heart I could not 
help taking sides with the children of the disin- 



162 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

herited against Harold as a representative of the 
exploiting classes. 

As to the fear of Harold's turning into a snob, 
that has long been shown to be completely un- 
founded. On this subject Harold's itinerary from 
his school to his home is illuminating evidence. I 
have said that in the morning Harold trots to 
school. In the morning Harold probably gets to 
school in five minutes. Returning it takes him 
half an hour. Emmeline has questioned him on 
the subject. It appears that in returning from 
school Harold maps a course due north by west 
by east by south so as to cover every local bit of 
topography that comes within his knowledge dur- 
ing the play hours of the afternoon. He tacks 
around unnecessary corners. He beats his way up 
a hill in the park which is a favorite tourney-place 
for the marble players of the vicinity. He skirts 
the shore of several window displays to the con- 
tents of which he has turned the conversation at 
home on several occasions. For five minutes at a 
time he is totally becalmed against some smooth 
expanse of brick wall excellent for handball prac- 
tice or on a sheltered corner for a bit of prelimi- 
nary knuckle exercise with his agates and his 
" immies." The White Wing flushing the pave- 
ment engages Harold's attention for as long as 



SCHOOL 163 

the work may seem to demand. Then, having as- 
sured himself that the world at 1.30 in the after- 
noon is very much as he left it at six o'clock the 
night before, he hastens to his lunch. 

No, there is little danger of the boy's growing 
up an aristocrat. The fierce democracy of the 
Street has him in its grasp. He chooses his play- 
mates by preference from the lower classes. He 
is like Walt Whitman in the way he singles out 
the dirtiest little boy in the block and says to him, 
" Camerado." He takes his fellow men as he finds 
them. When Harold was first sent off to school 
Emmeline was concerned to find a nice little boy 
for him to play with. She discovered one in a 
classmate of Harold's. We invited him to the 
house, and in half an hour a considerable portion 
of the wall paper in Harold's room was hanging in 
fringes. But in spite of a common basis of taste 
and temperament the two boys are not much to- 
gether, for the very reason, I presume, that their 
friendship has been to some extent imposed on 
them from above. No; Harold's tastes go down 
straight to the foundations of our social structure. 
Without recognizing class-distinctions he would 
rather play marbles with the son of a retail trades- 
man than with the son of a college professor, and 
with the son of a janitor than with the son of a 



164 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

storekeeper. If the janitor is a negro so much 
the better. The negro boys have the advantage 
over Harold in the matter of tint at the beginning 
of a game of marbles. But within half an hour 
Harold has overcome the handicap. If anything, 
his is the deeper shade of brown, though his color 
is not so evenly distributed. In such guise I can 
recognize Harold by a sort of instinct. But the 
only way a stranger could tell the child of Cauca- 
sian descent from the child of the Hamite would 
be by measuring Harold's cephalic index. 

It is a serious problem — the gains of democracy 
and the price we must pay. There are obvious 
advantages: the boy's education in the sense of 
human fellowship without regard to caste and 
color; his education in the rough and read}^ but 
fairly equitable law^s of the Street; his gain in 
self-confidence and self-restraint in play; not to 
mention the extremely beneficent effect on his ap- 
petite and his digestion. I have watched the boy 
at his marbles in the park, more eager, more 
drunken with the joy of existence than he is at 
school or in the house. I have seen him sprawl 
down on his knees and with the pad of his palm 
and four outstretched fingers measure off eight or 
ten horrible hand spaces in the dust from the hole 
to his opponent's marble. I have seen him rise 



SCHOOL 165 

from the earth like Antaeus, triumphant but hor- 
ribly besmirched, with the blue of his eyes gleam- 
ing piratically through the circumjacent soil; I 
have watched him and rejoiced and had my qualms. 
The price that Harold pays for democracy is in 
a slovenliness of speech which I find merely of- 
fensive but Emmeline finds utterly distracting. 
It seems a pity to have his school drill in phonetics 
and the memorizing of good literature vitiated by 
the slurred and clipped syllables of the streets. 
Harold says, " It is me," and frequently he says, 
" It is nuttin'." The final g of the participle has 
virtually disappeared from his vocabulary. He 
sometimes says, " I ain't got nuttin'." While Em- 
meline is distracted I am merely offended, because 
I recall that there is a great body of linguistic 
authority growing up in favor of Harold's demo- 
cratic practices in phonetics and grammar. When 
Harold says, "It is me," Professor Lounsbury 
should worry. By the time Harold grows up it 
will probably be good grammar to say, " I ain't 
got nothing." By the time Harold grows up the 
Decalogue, in its latent recension, will read, " Thou 
shalt not have none other gods before I," and 
" Thou shalt not bear no false witness against 
none of thy neighbors." I must not forget that 
whereas I have been brought up on Matthew 



166 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

Arnold, De Quincej, and Stevenson, Harold is 
growing up in the age of John Masefield. If the 
greatest literature and the foremost language is 
to be racy of the soil — and for that matter not 
only our speech and our literature, but if our 
morals and our social outlook are to be racy of 
the soil — if in every section of life the cry is back 
to the land, to the primitive, to the unashamed, 
sex-education, untrammeled art, democracy at its 
broadest, if — well, what I mean is that in any 
civilization based upon close contact with the soil, 
Harold will not be lost. Soil is right in his line. 
I am less concerned with the effect of the street 
upon Harold's vernacular because the boy seems 
gratefully immune against the more sordid aspects 
of the open-air life. His phonetics and his gram- 
mar are deteriorating, but there is no trace of foul- 
ness in his speech and in his thoughts. The rea- 
son is that Harold's open-air activities are con- 
fined entirely to play. His democracy centers 
about the ball ground and the marble pit. His 
absorption in games is so complete — too complete, 
to judge by the nervous exhaustion it sometimes 
brings — that it leaves no leisure or inclination for 
idle speech. His technical vocabulary of games 
is comprehensive. I sometimes marvel at the ease 
with which he has mastered the patois of sport — 



SCHOOL 167 

those cabalistic words which, shouted at the proper 
moment, signify that Harold prefers to let his 
marble rest and have his opponent shoot at him 
or that he has chosen to mark off so many hand 
spaces in the dirt and shoot at his opponent. But 
once the game is done he comes upstairs. He does 
not share in the spiritual life of the gang and 
he knows absolutely nothing of the premature 
intimacies of street childhood with the bitterness 
of life. On the whole I find the balance is in favor 
of marbles and democracy. 

Harold in the open air is an exceedingly impor- 
tant factor and a badly neglected one in present- 
day discussion of the child. The talk is either of 
the school or the home. If play is taken into 
account it is the regulated play of the school 
ground. Yet the Street is the citadel of the lib- 
erties of the child. Take the actual question of 
hours in Harold's day. He spends nearly twelve 
hours in bed, from seven to seven. He spends two 
hours, almost, at his meals. He spends four hours 
at school. He spends five hours at least in play. 
Under such an arrangement all talk about the 
despotism of school and the despotism of parents 
loses meaning to me. I have shown that the boy's 
school life is happ}^ But even if it were not, even 
if his body and soul were subjected to the tyran- 



168 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

nies the sentimental revolutionist is so fond of call- 
ing up, those twelve hours of sleep and five hours 
of play are a reservoir of physical and spiritual 
recuperation which would make life more than tol- 
erable to Harold. On the whole I think I am not 
less sensitive than Harold to pain and oppression. 
But if my employer were to let me sleep twelve 
hours in the twenty-four and play five hours and 
spend two hours at table, I should consider myself 
a very happy man. 

I have reserved my confession for the very last. 
I find it difficult to take school at Harold's age — 
or for that matter at any age — ^seriously enough 
to grow extremely agitated over its problems. 
Montessori or Dr. Birch — the difference is not 
vast. Naturally I do not go as far as Mr. 
Squeers. School is just a ripple on the surface of 
the ocean of young life and feeling, and whether 
the ripple shapes after the Froebel pattern or the 
Montessori wrinkle makes little difference to the 
depths below. I can make the assertion with con- 
fidence about Harold without any very precise 
knowledge of what are the depths in him. 



VIII 

HAROLD AND THE UNIVERSE 

There are anxious days in Belshazzar Court 
when the spirit of meekness and self-sacrifice de- 
scends upon Harold. The change usually comes 
on without warning, though by watching very 
closely we can detect the insidious approach of 
Harold's goodness. He will come up from his 
marbles or ball game a bit earlier than usual and 
put away his tools with a gentle air of disen- 
chantment. Like Ecclesiastes, Byron, and Ga- 
briele D'Annunzio, he has found the emptiness 
of pleasure and he makes a voluntary offer of his 
entire stock of agates to the baby, which reminds 
me of King Lear. At table he will emerge com- 
pletely out of the world of private concerns in 
which he customarily dwells and ask how cannon 
are made and what is the immediate outlook for 
Home Rule. But more frequently his days of 
calm will follow upon a night of wrack and stoinn, 
which leaves every member of the family ex- 
hausted. The exact course of Harold's moods is 
still to be put on the map. 
169 



170 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

At any rate, soon after six in the morning, 
when the orchestral chorus of Belshazzar Court 
is tuning up with a click of water-pipes, the whir 
of coffee-grinders, and muffled explosions from the 
gas-range turned on in full force by sleepy-eyed 
maids, we grow aware of a saintly presence in 
Harold's room. Someone is moving about gently 
with evident concern for those of us still in bed. 
Doors open with the same discreet caution. Soft- 
ened footsteps pad along the hallwaj^, and there is 
a gentlemanly splashing in the bathroom. Inves- 
tigation discloses that it is a quarter of seven and 
Harold in an arm-chair before the window reading 
his Arabian Nights. He is washed, dressed, 
combed, and brushed. The problems of the toilet, 
the choice of a suit for the day, the discovery of 
the one unlucky shoe which always gets lost — 
all these customary intricacies have been solved, 
swiftly, surely, and with an economy of motion 
and noise that would delight the hearts of a con- 
gressful of scientific engineers. 

Naturally we ask Harold whether he is not feel- 
ing well. He says that he is very well. But he 
says it in a tone of seraphic patience that leaves 
us unconvinced, and when Harold announces that 
it is his intention always to get up at this hour 
in the future and to dress without bothering his 



HAROLD AND THE UNIVERSE 171 

mother, Emmeline calls him to her and feels his 
head. His forehead is cool. His tongue is red 
and moist. His eyes are clear. But just when 
Emmeline is ready to be reassured Harold asks 
whether the baby had been restless and hopes that 
she did not disturb our sleep in any way. There- 
upon Emmeline feels his forehead once more and 
recalls that whenever he has been seriously ill the 
evil came on slowly. 

Harold is thoughtful over his breakfast, but 
eats neither too fast nor too slowly, and with none 
of the minor accidents that sometimes mark his 
self-absorbed demeanor at table. Emmeline 
watches him, and Harold, knowing that he is 
watched, pretends not to notice. Emmeline recalls 
that this is the way people behave who are gravely 
afflicted. They pretend not only that they are not 
ill and are not anxious about themselves, but that 
they do not notice other people's anxiety about 
themselves. About half-past seven Harold gets 
up from the table and asks which coat is he to 
wear to school. Inasmuch as this is one hour and 
twenty minutes earlier than his usual time for de- 
parture, Emmeline shakes her head. She even 
makes a motion to feel Harold's brow again, but I 
protest that the constant friction is enough in it- 
self to give the boy a temperature. So we tell the 



172 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

boy that it is too early to go to school and he may 
play in his room. He says he is tired of play and 
he would prefer to practice his penmanship because 
he had been told that if his writing improved he 
would be moved up to the upper half of the class. 
" I like to write my words in the morning," he says. 
" I am going to do it every day." He works at 
his model sentences until Emmeline tells him that 
he has done enough and must now play awhile. 

"Have I time?" he asks, and his voice is like 
St. Cecilia. It is heartrending, this fear of dread- 
ful evil impending over Harold which one discerns 
but cannot localize. He insists on leaving for 
school twenty minutes too early. Before going he 
declares that he likes to go to school with his shoes 
nicely polished. He had polished them himself. 

At night I find the atmosphere sultry with ap- 
prehension. The suspense begins ta tell. Harold 
came home directly from school instead of follow- 
ing his usual roundabout course by which he cov- 
ers three blocks in thirty-five minutes. At lunch 
he asked for stewed carrots. Harold detests 
stewed carrots, and there were none for lunch nor 
had there been any for several days in deference to 
his prejudices. He was disappointed to hear that 
there were no carrots, and he asked that he might 
have some to-morrow and every day thereafter. 



HAROLD AND THE UNIVERSE 173 

Determined to break up this mood of painful beati- 
tude, Emmeline asks whether he would like some 
ice cream for dessert. " Is ice cream good for 
me?" he asks, and nearly brings his mother to 
tears. 

If only he would break something! But no. 
Harold, whose course about the house is so fre- 
quently strewn with chairs shoved out of place 
and things dropping from tables and book-shelves, 
moves about like Isadora Duncan, a graceful 
wraith among inviting corners and edges. After 
lunch, I am told, he pulled the heaviest accessible 
volume from the book-shelves, a book which he 
knew had no pictures in it, and he read several 
pages of Clayhanger with extraordinary concen- 
tration. He did not refuse to go out to play, and 
his apparent indifference was belied by the fact 
that he did not reappear until late in the after- 
noon. There was a gleam of hope in that, and 
Emmehne was further encouraged when he came 
upstairs in about his customary condition of be- 
smirchment ; we seemed to be seeing light. 

Harold was in his room making ready for bed 
while we at table wondered what it all meant. 
Suddenly there was the sound of a crash followed 
by a yell. Emmeline raised her head and a look 
of ineffable relief came into her face. The yell 



174 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

emanated from the baby. She yelled again and 
then Harold shouted. They alternated for some 
time and then fell into a duet of indignant clamor. 
I went to study the situation on the spot. I found 
that just as he had taken off one shoe and was 
busy with the other something had happened to 
Harold's soul which impelled him to get out of bed 
and run out into the hall and overturn the baby's 
doll carriage with its precious burden. He had 
then taken the doll and thrown it under the bed and 
was making a pretense of climbing into the doll 
carriage. It took some time to disentangle the 
two, but we did it with glad hearts. Harold was 
himself again. 

I am convinced that he has a sense of humor. 
It does not consist in saying the bright things 
which are funny to us but quite serious to the 
child who utters them. To the extent that children 
are consciously humorous they are so in action 
rather than in speech. And even in action it is 
hard to tell how much is humor and how much is 
mischief which accidentally takes on an amusing 
aspect. An example of this kind would be the 
disposition Harold once made of his garters for 
several nights running. Switching on the light 
in his room one night, when the boy was fast 



HAROLD AND THE UNIVERSE 175 

asleep, I discovered his garters neatly strung over 
the chandelier. Even by standing on his bed 
Harold could not reach the chandelier. The feat 
therefore must have required some very deft 
angling and a degree of patience that I never 
thought was in the boy. I suppose Harold's gar- 
ters on the gas bracket would be humor to Pro- 
fessor Bergson, since the incongruity of the result 
must have been present to the boy's mind. Yet 
the impelling motive was mischief. 

But Harold was without question a self-con- 
scious humorist when I found him one night in 
bed supposedly trying to go to sleep. He had 
taken a piece of wrapping cord and tied one end 
to his left thumb and the other end to the bed- 
stead. When I asked what it all meant he said it 
was to keep himself from falling out of bed. Is it 
paternal pride in me which makes me discern a 
master's touch in that episode ? At any rate, there 
was here a calculated effect upon a possible audi- 
ence. He had been lying there in the dark and 
chuckled and waited for someone to come in. 

It is no argument against Harold as a humorist 
that he is also a good deal of a baby. Whatever 
may be the case with your epigrammatic wits and 
their penny stock of worldly disenchantment, true 
humor comes out of an inextinguishable innocence 



176 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

of the heart. Mark Twain had it and Mr. Dooley 
has it and Swift had it, and I believe that Harold 
has it. Only the innocent heart can pass quickly 
from laughter to tears; laughter which means a 
child-like contentment with the goodness of the 
world, and tears which mean profound discourage- 
ment with the badness of the world, instead of the 
thin-lipped wit which is based on the conviction 
that there is no good and no bad — unless the good 
is bad and the bad good — ^and that it doesn't mat- 
ter anyway. But though I have my theory pat 
on the subject, I find it always a shock to think 
that a humorist capable of a masterpiece like tying 
himself into bed with a wrapping string should oc- 
casionally be discovered at play in a corner with 
furnishings from the wardrobe of his sister's doll. 
Not frequently, in justice to Harold, but it 
happens. 

Nor is it against Harold's sense of humor that 
he will often laugh w^ithout occasion but because 
of his mere capacity for laughter. Harold's ex- 
perience with the Home Page in the afternoon 
newspaper is illuminating on this point. The Home 
Page, as is well known, is equally divided between 
comic pictures and text and serious aids to house- 
keeping, a division at that time unknown to Harold, 
who was interested only in the comics. These pic- 



HAROLD AND THE UNIVERSE 177 

tures he had got me into the habit of expounding 
to him, and since the artist knew his audience, 
Harold laughed in the proper places. However, it 
happened one day that Harold, not having had 
enough of the comic pictures, insisted that I read 
to him the printed text in small type distributed 
between the pictures. I read all the jokes, and he 
was not yet satisfied. So I went on and read the 
Household Hints to him — how young potatoes 
should be kept in a small flat, and how linen hand- 
kerchiefs should be ironed, and what will relieve 
rheumatism of the arm-joints; and when I men- 
tioned new potatoes or linen or rheumatism of 
the arm-joints Harold held his sides and shrieked. 
Evidently this could have happened only to the 
innocent soul laden to the bursting point with 
laughter and waiting for the prick of the magic 
word like potatoes or linen handkerchief or rheu- 
matism to release the flood. 

He has his dark moods. They come on as sud- 
denly as his attacks of goodness. There is the 
mood of destruction. Not that Harold is con- 
tinent at best. He consumes clothes, books, toys 
with a swiftness which may be the sign of an 
enviable capacity for living in the moment only. 
Who knows.? As modern parents it would be pre- 



178 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

sumptuous in us to attempt to impose our own 
standards of orderliness and routine upon the boy. 
But the moods of destruction to which I refer are 
Harold's ordinary state raised to the nth power. 
On such a day his path is through wreckage. 
Things break, tear, rip, slice, and crumble to 
pieces under his fingers. His own body does not 
escape. It is a day of falls, cuts, bruises, a gen- 
eral malaise, which expresses itself in frequent 
tears ; and when he is not crying he is on the edge 
of whimpering. The moral law and the law of 
gravitation seem to be simultaneously repealed for 
him. Objects that ought to remain suspended on 
the wall precipitate themselves to the floor. Ob- 
jects like chairs and footstools which properly be- 
long on the floor turn somersaults, mount upon the 
beds, clamber over each other. Harold is by turns 
spiteful, sullen, boisterous, unhappy, and as a 
rule, bandaged. These are days when all the woe 
of the world seems to have descended upon 
his shoulders. 

I have often wondered why educators and re- 
formers who are so concerned for the freedom of 
the child will deny the child's right to such occa- 
sional moods of sullen rebellion. For ourselves, 
grown-up men and women, we are very ready to 
claim the slightest excuse for anti-social behavior. 



HAROLD AND THE UNIVERSE 179 

A touch of indigestion will serve a man as suffi- 
cient reason for coming down to the office with a 
scowl and barking all morning at his subordinates. 
And the victims of his temper also think the rea- 
son sufficient: the poor fellow probably ate un- 
wisely last night after the theater. The dyspeptic 
touch will cause a man to douse himself in oceans 
of self-pity as if any reason on earth existed why 
he should wreak himself on welsh rarebits at 
midnight. 

Whereas the child.'* With full knowledge of 
the delicate nature of his physiological machinery 
we yet deny that any mechanical dislocation is suf- 
ficient excuse for his making other people uncom- 
fortable. Up to the age of four or five the right 
to be fretful after loss of sleep is probably recog- 
nized by most parents. But between five and 
twelve, say, the presumption is that a boy must 
either be under the doctor's care or else in perfect 
health. The intervening stages of discomfort, 
fatigue, nervous strain, are overlooked. Sullen- 
ness, that most disagreeable of qualities in a child, 
can easily be traced to a physiological basis, and 
one much less reprehensible than the midnight 
rarebit of the adult or the wild debauches of shop- 
ping and dress-fitting that lead to headaches. But 
whereas strong men can go down to the office and 



180 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

growl and women can retire to their rooms with 
a handkerchief around the head, the child is de- 
nied the privilege of seeking the seclusion which 
he needs. If like a young animal he looks for a 
corner in which to suck his wounded paw, we call 
it sullenness and insist that he remain in our so- 
ciety and find it agreeable. The right of the child 
to be out-of-sorts occasionally is one of the 
privileges which must be inscribed in any charter 
of freedom that the Century of the Child is to 
draw up for him. 

But if Harold is destructive he is not blood- 
thirsty. In this respect I believe he is an excep- 
tional child. He is warlike, but a love of gore for 
its own sake does not possess him. He will arm 
himself with a crusader's dirk made of a lead pencil 
and a clothespin and inflict gaping wounds on the 
mattress and the pillow, but I have never heard 
him ask for buckets of blood to drink as other 
children will do. In stories of Christian martyrs 
and the lions I do not recall that he has taken 
sides with the lions. He is happy to shoot down 
countless enemies — represented by ninepins or 
perhaps his sister's dolls — with an improvised rifle, 
but he does not go to the extreme of mutilating 
his enemies and parading their reeking heads upon 
the point of the sword like other boys of his age I 



HAROLD AND THE UNIVERSE 181 

know. The sight of his own life's fluid stirs him 
to inexpressible outcries of anguish and imaginary 
pain. I recall one visit to the dentist, a grim and 
prolonged engagement in which Harold lost a 
tooth and the dentist nearly lost his reason. That 
entire afternoon, after he was quite well, the boy 
would apply his handkerchief to his mouth every 
ten minutes and, detecting an imaginary red spot, 
he would howl like someone in Dante. 

Actual pain he bears very well. If he cries when 
he is ill, it is largely out of self-pity. Properly 
approached he will submit to painful ministrations 
with very little outcry. The proper way to ap- 
proach him is to argue. Direct bribery is of no 
avail. In fact, the mention of nice things he may 
have when he gets well only stirs him to clamor at 
the thought of what he is losing in the immediate 
present. But he will listen to reason, provided 
reason, like other medicaments, is applied with 
infinite patience. He must have time to think 
your proposition over. Given time, he will brace 
himself to his duty. When the episode is over, he 
is irradiated with a glow of self-appreciation 
that cheers us all up. He will compliment Emme- 
line on her surgical skill ; he will remark that he ex- 
pected the operation to be much more complicated 
than he found it to be; he may even offer to have 



182 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

it done all over again, an offer which we receive in 
the spirit in which it is submitted, as an evidence 
of good will rather than as a practical issue. 

In writing of Harold I find myself continually 
returning to the one trait so predominant in the 
boy as almost to constitute, for us, his personality. 
And yet I dare say he is not unlike other children 
in that respect. I refer to his self-contained 
spiritual life, to the secret fountain of his thoughts 
into which he will grant us only a glimpse, and 
that involuntarily. The educational sociologues 
confound hypocrisy with honest reticence when 
they insist that the child shall be a sort of infantile 
George Moore with his heart and whatever else is 
inside him on his sleeve. It is one thing for Harold 
to hold back some confession of misdeeds, to re- 
fuse an answer to a direct question bearing on a 
practical problem of mutual concern. It is quite 
another thing that he does not consider the secret 
processes of his soul as material for general con- 
versation. He has, of course, his periods of gar- 
rulity ; at bedtime, for instance, when he will rack 
his brain for topics to postpone the turning down 
of the light and the closed door. On such occa- 
sions when invented matter fails him he will take 
up in desperation some subject that is really close 
to his heart ; but rarely at any other time. 




When the Curtain of Night Rises on Riverside 



HAROLD AND THE UNIVERSE 183 

It is an error to suppose that children take pleas- 
ure in asking unanswerable questions ; at least 
children of Harold's age. They have delicacy. 
Harold may be insistent in putting questions which 
are difficult simply because the matter is hard to 
explain, but he is aware that there are other topics 
which we do not want to talk about, and these he 
will avoid to spare our susceptibilities, or else ap- 
proach them with circumspection. The mystery 
of death, for instance, is a subject that fascinates 
the mind of every child. But Harold, having en- 
countered extreme reluctance on our part to dis- 
cuss the matter with him, will display the most 
extraordinary ingenuity in bending conversation 
in that direction, always framing his questions so 
as to leave the initiative to us. I am afraid that 
the crabbed piece-meal information we offer him 
gives him a rather contemptuous opinion at times 
of our courage or our intelligence. His own im- 
pressions of the great mystery I suspect are not 
far from the truth, but whenever I try to find out 
he will turn the subject. Partly this is because 
of a general reluctance to frame his creed upon 
demand, but partly also it is his desire to spare us 
the embarrassment of fibbing. 

Harold's economy in putting questions is a 
thing for which I am profoundly grateful. It 



184 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

spares me the hypocrisy of saying, " I don't 
know " on matters of which I do know something 
but consider to be outside the sphere of Harold's 
legitimate concern. It spares me the ignominy 
of inventing cocksure answers on subjects of a 
harmless nature, but on which I am unfortunately 
ignorant. But difficulties will arise. In the field 
of natural history, for example, I think I know 
something of general principles. I think I could 
give a fair account of the difference between Dar- 
winism and Weismanism. I think I know what 
the mutation theory of De Vries means. By re- 
freshing my memory in the encyclopaedia I could 
sum up the Mendelian hypothesis without getting 
more than half the specific facts wrong. But un- 
fortunately Harold is not interested in the dif- 
ference between Darwin and Lamarck, but in the 
difference between an apple tree and a maple. 
There he is better informed than I, and it has 
often been his lot to instruct me. He offers his 
information in gentlemanly fashion, without a 
trace of pedantry. On the whole I think that as 
between the things Harold asks me and the things 
he tells me the balance is in favor of the latter. 

Harold's views upon me are perfectly natural: 
that is, they are extremely complex. I am a be- 



HAROLD AND THE UNIVERSE 185 

nevolent power, but not an omnipotent power. I 
am the power that promises circuses and generous 
quantities of confectionery, only to have my cir- 
cuses countermanded and my candy estimates 
radically revised downward by a higher power 
that works for the ultimate best interests of 
Harold ; it is spelled Emmeline. But if the boy is 
thus brought to recognize the limitations on my 
authority, this applies only within the home and 
in matters concerning his own welfare. With re- 
gard to Harold, I am a sort of inferior deity who 
is himself subject to the power of Necessity. But 
outside — in the vague universe included within 
the limits of the Office, to which I depart and from 
which I return like Apollo Helios into and out 
from the sea, except that I set in the morning 
and rise at night — I am to Harold a divinity of the 
first magnitude. It is his general impression that 
I write all the fourteen pages of the newspaper 
for which I am working; that in my outside time 
I write the high-class monthlies ; that I have writ- 
ten the greater part of the books in my library, 
including the Encyclopedia Britannica; and that 
having written all these books, I have also printed 
them, bound them, and sold them at hundreds of 
dollars a copy. 

Such being his earnest belief with regard to my 



186 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

professional capacities, it is natural that when en- 
gaged in the most ancient children's game in the 
world, namely, the matching of fathers, Harold's 
fancy should give itself free rein. I presume it is 
the rudiments of that sentiment which we later 
describe as patriotism that impels Harold to claim 
for his father superhuman achievements in ath- 
letics and business. At that the boy has his 
limitations of conscience. There was one occasion 
when his friend Herbert asserted that his father 
once took an ordinary bamboo rod and caught a 
whale. It was a comfort to have Harold assume 
a skeptical attitude, and instead of declaring that 
his father; once caught a fish as big as the Wool- 
worth Building, content himself with impugning 
his opponent's veracity. Probably Harold's sense 
of humor here enters to apprise him that it is suf- 
ficient to have a father who can throw a baseball 
further than any man alive, lift heavier weights 
than Sandow, and earn $1,000 an hour by writing 
the world's best literature, without claiming for 
him the impossible feat of catching a whale at the 
end of a bamboo pole. 

How does Harold reconcile my character as a 
composite Rockefeller — Brickley — William Dean 
Howells with the fact that when I have promised 



HAROLD AND THE UNIVERSE 187 

him a bar of chocolate after supper I have been 
sometimes forced to sit by silently and have my 
decision reversed with costs in an elaborate opin- 
ion by United States Supreme Court Justice Em- 
meline, nobody dissenting? If on such occasions 
the sense of frustrated desire does not embitter 
the boy overmuch, it may be that he will recognize 
my subjection to the above-mentioned law of Ne- 
cessity, to which all must bend. Otherwise I sup- 
pose Harold regards me with a fair measure of 
contempt, possibly mixed with pity. Sometimes 
there is no trace of pity. Sometimes Harold be- 
haves abominably. While Justice Emmeline's 
opinion with regard to the circus or the chocolate 
is being formulated, Harold will lend me a 
sneaking sort of moral support, eying me 
furtively and pulling the longest face at his dis- 
posal without daring to commit himself in words. 
But once the sentence of reversal is pronounced 
Harold knows where his bread is buttered. He 
flops shamefully to the winning side, and in his 
zeal to make his peace with the de facto powers, 
he turns on me m the most shameful manner, de- 
claring that Father is always offering him things 
that are not good for him, that circuses are a bore 
anyhow, and that he would much rather wait till 
to-morrow and have a small bit of chocolate with 



188 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

the assurance that it would do him good instead of 
harm. Yes he would, the traitor ! 

And yet the boy's conduct is natural. When the 
bitterness of his base desertion passes, I am the 
first to acknowledge the justice as well as the 
prudence of his course. I am a good enough imi- 
tation god for Harold's ordinary purposes, a Baal 
for moments of ease and prosperity and guilty 
dalliance. But when adversity falls, and the su- 
preme test comes between Baal and the Jehovah 
of justice and righteous Necessity, he flies instinc- 
tively to the embrace of the Higher Power, which 
is Emmeline. He turns his back with decision on 
the circuses and the chocolates of the Gentiles 
and meekly confesses the authority of one in whose 
hands are the gifts that follow upon a sane wor- 
ship of the Law. Ex tenebris — at midnight, when 
Harold wakes sometimes with sudden pain, or in 
the hush of the sickroom, or in the long twilight 
of convalescence when the passions run low and 
Harold is conscious only of his frail mortality, it 
is not upon me that Harold calls. At such mo- 
ments I am like Baal and Odin and Jupiter 
Olympus when their moment comes. I am dis- 
tinctly de trop. At such moments, with doctors 
and nurses in the house, and an air of general 
Ineptitude oppressing me, what can I do but retire 



HAROLD AND THE UNIVERSE 189 

to my own room and try to read Galsworthy in a 
thick Goetterdammerung of tobacco smoke until 
Necessity, snatching a moment from the sickroom, 
insists that I put on my hat and go out for a 
walk? 

As I think back over the random obser\^ations 
and memories I have here thrown together I feel 
that this paper demands an honester title than the 
one I set down at the beginning. Of course, 
" Harold and the Universe " is good for catch- 
penny purposes. But " Field Notes on Harold " 
would have been the truer heading. There is little 
here of that fine consecutiveness and subtlety 
which you find in modern theories about the child ; 
but so many of these theories are untrue. There 
is this element of unity in my remarks that they 
are intended to convey an impression of this com- 
plex thing called the Child which is now being re- 
duced to such easy formulas — formulas which in 
the name of a higher freedom for the child 
threaten the true freedom of the child with our 
rough groping invasions into his spontaneous soul 
life. Or else they set up a child of straw, describ- 
ing him as a victim of despotism which is not so, as 
A slave to futile standards which is not so, as a 
neglected, pitiful creature, which is not so. Exag- 



190 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

geration, which lies at the basis of every enthu- 
siasm, has exaggerated out of our common talk 
the old, true notion of the child as an inexhaustible 
source of freedom and happiness, as a being who 
stands in no need of charters of rights and declara- 
tions of independence, because these are rights 
which we cannot alienate, however we try. 

Who am I, to kick against the formula makers? 
In my description of Harold I might easily have 
revealed a greater degree of precise information 
^nd a firmer grasp on general principles. Harold 
is an enormous investment. He represents a vast 
"Capitalization of sacrifices, hopes, labors, fears, 
and doubts. And yet if you were to ask me to 
issue a prospectus on Harold, describing how soon 
and just how big the dividends will be on the capi- 
talization, I could not tell you. On the basis of 
the preceding account I should have the greatest 
difficulty in listing Harold on the Stock Exchange, 
not to speak of having him designated as a legal 
investment for savings banks and insurance com- 
panies. Wild-cat speculator that I am, who am 
I to criticise the earnest men and women who 
would establish childhood on the sure basis of 
Standard Oil Subsidiaries and English Consols? 
But on this subject I prefer to be a gambler and 
take a chance. 



IX 

THE LANE THAT HAS NO TURNING 



In the world as known to Baedeker there are only 
two streets that can compare with Fifth Avenue, 
and these are both on Manhattan Island. From its 
source in the asphalt bottoms of Washington Square 
to where it loses itself in the coal-middens of the 
Harlem River at 143d Street, the Avenue runs a 
course of almost exactly seven miles. It runs true 
to the North Star, without a turn, with only a single 
pause, grimly bent on its business, in a way calculated 
to make the dowager metropolises of Europe lift their 
eyebrows and say, " How American ! " Its rivals are 
Eighth Avenue, a half-mile to the west, which may 
be some nine hundred feet longer; and, still farther 
west. Tenth, or Amsterdam Avenue, the titan of all 
urban highways, nine miles up hill and down as 
determined in the primeval blue-print shaped by the 
city fathers some time about the year 1800. All 
191 



192 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

three streets have character as well as length, but 
Fifth Avenue alone has significance. 

I know that this will seem very crude to the esthetic 
snobs who are always deploring the checker-board 
pattern of Manhattan Island, with avenues that run 
up and down, and streets that sprint from river to 
river. They call the pattern monotonous because 
tliey see it only on the map. I have never found 
it depressing to stand at the corner of Fifth 
Avenue and Twenty-third Street and look south a 
mile, and north to the horizon, and east and west 
toward the two rivers, myself the center of a circle 
with a million people in it. Criticism of our gridiron 
city is only a way people have of echoing the 
English, who like to have their streets like their 
education bills and franchise laws — never going 
straight at anything, but full of kinks and knots and 
cul de sacs, I recall the hero of one recent English 
novel who walks out of a house in low spirits, and 
looks up and down " the dreary length of Gower 
Street," an interminable street perhaps ten blocks 
long by our measurements. I was struck by Gower 
Street because it was there I used to go many years 
ago in London just for the purpose of looking up 
and down, when my eyes were aching for as much 
as a fifth of a mile of clear roadway without run- 
ning into a warehouse of the period of George II., 



LANE WITH NO TURNING 193 

or a pile of "mansions/* or anything but a bit of 
the sky at the end of a street. When the English 
find themselves somehow or other tricked into tolerat- 
ing a road more than a quarter of a mile long they 
refuse to acknowledge it, but give different names 
to every other block, calling it Oxford Street and 
High Holborn, or Edgeware Road and Maida Vale; 
and if they can put a church in the middle of the 
road, so much the better. When the English have a 
street twenty feet wide and five hundred feet long 
they call it Great Queen Street, and when they have 
a street that suggests Fifth Avenue they make the 
best of it by calling it Park Lane. When the 
English — But why stir up ancient wrongs ? 

What I meant to say was that the city fathers 
when they endowed us with our geometrical streets 
and avenues were wiser than their modern critics, 
because they built according to their material and 
their needs. They had on their hands an island con- 
structed by the original architect something on the 
model of Abraham Lincoln. They accordingly fitted 
the island with a suit of democratic clothes, built for 
use and comfort, instead of cluttering it up with 
periwig circles and diagonal avenue sashes and frilled 
terraces. They recognized that the shortest way 
from the tip to the root of this tongue of land we 
call Manhattan was by straight lines. So they acted 



194> BELSHAZZAR COURT 

not only in conformity with the material at hand, 
but with the national spirit, which cuts straight across 
things. And because they were faithful to their 
material and their native spirit they were better 
artists than the men who would have us tack from 
Park Row to Harlem because that's the way it's 
done in London and Florence. 



II 



Destiny and democracy have thus combined to 
make Fifth Avenue the longest and straightest of 
the world's great boulevards. The same forces have 
made it the most representative of avenues. That 
is not the way we usually think of Fifth Avenue. 
Tradition still describes it as a show avenue, an 
avenue for driving distinguished visitors upon, an 
avenue to muck-rake in the sociological novels and to 
photograph on Easter Sunday^ an avenue to which 
lead all the roads from Pittsburg and Cripple Creek 
and Butte, Montana. Fifth Avenue may be that, but 
as a simple geometrical fact it is a great deal more. 
That is why I have insisted upon its full seven miles. 
In its entire length Fifth Avenue is not one thing, 
but everything — a symbol, a compendium, a cross- 
section of the national life. It has wealth well sea- 
soned, and wealth new and flamboyant. It has 



LANE WITH NO TURNING 195 

patrician houses, parvenu houses, boarding-houses, 
and tenements. It has all the races: early Knicker- 
bocker and late Italian close together at its source; 
Jewish garment- workers along its lower course; cos- 
mopolites in the hotels and shops farther north; the 
old stock again from Forty-second Street to Carnegie 
Hill; a newer Ghetto from Ninety-sixth to 125th 
Street; a sprinkling of the old immigration for per- 
haps a quarter of a mile; once more a mixture of 
the newer crowds; ending all in the negro tenements 
near the Harlem. 

So Fifth Avenue is a study in progressive sociology 
with mansions, factories, shops, hotels, shops again, 
mansions again, churches, libraries, museums, vacant 
lots, hospitals, parks, and slums. Its range of natural 
scenery is unrivaled. It has flatlands, lakes, and a 
very respectable tree-clad mountain. It has wild and 
domesticated animals; in cages, to be sure, but still 
they are there. Obviously a street like that cannot 
be called aristocratic. It is quite the other thing. 
If it falls short of the representative democratic ideal, 
it is only in the matter of moving-picture theaters. 
I expect not to be believed when I say that for the 
first five and a quarter miles of its course Fifth 
Avenue is without a photo-play theater. There is 
none between Washington Square and 106th Street. 
In the last mile and a half the deficiency is nearly 



196 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

made up, but not quite. Still, the forces of progress 
are at work and presumably will not be denied. 

Washington Square is in itself the city reduced 
to the microscopic scale of an acre and a half. The 
old New York and the new face each other across 
less than a furlong of concrete and foliage. Years 
ago the south front of the square lost caste and 
went into the hands of the table d'hote and the Italian 
dealer in old metal. Except for the obscured beauties 
of Victorian lintel and fanlight it was a slum. Of 
late there has been a counter immigration. Studios 
have evicted the unclean shops and eating-houses, 
and the accumulated grime of the years has made 
way for large north lights. To-day art on Washing- 
ton Square South is prosperous. At one end the long 
row of studio dwellings is flanked by a gay church 
in yellow brick with a campanile, the juxtaposition 
of religion and art being quite accidental. At the 
other end Macdougal Street sets out to run south 
through the heart of the down-town negro quarter. 
The east side of the square is dominated by the dull 
gray mass of New York University's professional 
schools, and just around the corner there is a celluloid- 
factory; so much for learning and industry. Across 
the square, on the west, sheltered behind fronts of 
brownstone lodging-houses, is a little of everything — 
a little of literature and journalism, a bit of music 



LANE WITH NO TURNING 197 

and the theater, magazine illustration, social service, 
and something of the I. W. W. For Washington 
Square West is the frontier of the physical and spirit- 
ual region that goes by the name of Greenwich 
Village. 

The people in the studios on the south side of the 
square have for business purposes the large north 
lights. For inspiration they have the mellow 
warmth of the red-brick homes of the patricians 
filtered through the tender green of the trees in April. 
These fronts of red brick facing south have been 
drinking in the sun for generations, taking it into 
the pores of the clay, gulping it in through the 
spacious windows which we have apparently for- 
gotten how to build. How to be placid and radiant 
at the same time is a problem which the specialists 
of the beauty columns in the newspapers are con- 
tinually pondering. Washington Square North has 
the secret. It has poise and it has the joy of life. 
Presumably the secret lies in the consciousness of an 
assured position. Onyx and marble carvings are for 
the upstart apartment-house of twelve stories. The 
low fa9ades on Washington Square North have grace 
with simplicity, warmth with reserve. For sheer 
loveliness there is nothing in the city to compare 
with that row of red-brick burgher houses in spring 
unless it be the glimpse of Momingside Park and 



198 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

Cathedral Heights from the south, which one gets 
on a morning of sunshine from the curve of the " L " 
at 110th Street. 

The artists and radical folk of Washington Square 
and its environs are an ungrateful and an illogical 
tribe; either that or they are insincere. When they 
are not painting or writing or agitating, they know 
nothing better than to belittle the past whose beauty 
they are eager enough to inherit. They inhabit the 
spacious, high-ceilinged rooms which earlier genera- 
tions have built, and say all manner of evil concern- 
ing the builders. Was it indeed a crabbed life that 
people lived in New York when these houses of red 
brick with fanlights, lintels, noble windows and bal- 
conies were being created? It is a puzzle. These 
houses bespeak in everything a robust simplicity, a 
love for plain outlines, and the primitive shades — 
red, white, black. Suburban civilization to-day builds 
outside for gables and dormer windows, and inside 
for ingle corners, heavy panelings in the dim religious 
light of stained glass, low ceilings from which depend 
massive rafters ; the rafters hang and do not support, 
and threaten to give w^ay and precipitate their medi- 
eval weight on the heads of people reading Walt 
Whitman. How, in fair consistency, can Walt Whit- 
man be read by the fitful murk of an Oriental lantern ? 
What sense is there in demanding light and air in 



LANE WITH NO TURNING 199 

our social relations while we banish them from our 
homes? And on the other hand, how is it conceivable 
that men once upon a time could have staggered 
about in dim moralities, crabbed beliefs, and atrophied 
sympathies, and yet build cheery houses of red brick 
with great windows? It is a puzzle. 



Ill 



The impress of Washington Square is upon Fifth 
Avenue for nearly, but not quite, the first half-mile; 
say as far as Thirteenth Street, where the Georgian 
red brick gives way suddenly to granite and grime. 
Scarcely two minutes* walk north of the square is 
the loveliest house on the Avenue — red brick, of 
course, but the glow of the sun-warmed clay radiant 
through a veiling of naked vine as I recall it in early 
spring. The note of the Avenue is struck at the very 
beginning, a note of gaiety four miles long, main- 
tained through miles of shops and hotels and tremend- 
ously expensive homes, except for a hideous interval 
of smudgy commerce that runs from Fourteenth Street 
to Madison Square. It is a stately gaiety sounding 
the decorous measure of the minuet. The patricians 
are nearly all gone from the red-brick dwellings on 
lower Fifth Avenue, but they have left their impress 
on the furnished-room houses. Down the side-streets, 



200 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

east and west^ the note of placid ease is continued 
in red brick and wrought-iron balconies, boarding- 
houses nearly all, but it will be some years before 
their present occupation molds the outer face of the 
neighborhood. Before that note is quite gone we 
shall be compelled to tear down the miniature 
cathedral at Eleventh Street which goes by the name 
of First Presbyterian Church, and erect in its place a 
twelve-story " loft " in shiny stucco which will be a 
murky horror. 

At Thirteenth Street old Fifth Avenue disappears 
80 abruptly as to hurt. The sky-line on either side 
heaves up from three stories to ten or more. The 
prevailing colors are grime and gold, the dirty gray 
of limestone, granite, and stucco, and the gold of 
ready-made-clothing signs flaunted across fifty feet 
of front. This is the Fifth Avenue of the " loft ** 
factories, brought here in spite of enormous rents, 
by the magic of the name upon department-store 
proprietors in Houston, Texas. High noon of a 
warm day finds Fifth Avenue between Fourteenth 
Street and Twenty-third filled with larger, more 
vehement, more eloquent, gesticulating crowds than 
the Agora at Athens or the Forum ever saw except 
on special occasions. 

At Madison Square the Avenue plunges into a final 
orgy of sky-scraping. The place reeks with white- 



LANE WITH NO TURNING 201 

marble palaces, battlements, pinnacles, and barracks. 
Diana of the Garden on her golden globe defends 
her ancient primacy against the enormous hulk of the 
Flatiron sweeping north like the prow of a super- 
hyperdreadnought to which a considerate tobacco 
company has added the semblance of a battering 
ram in the shape of an extension show-window; 
against the glistening shaft of the Metropolitan; 
against sixteen-story Babylonian temples devoted to 
cloaks and suits. Diana on her tower has vanished 
from the novels of New York life. Young men from 
the country, who come up for the conquest of New 
York and formulate their siege plan on the benches 
in Madison Square, no longer look up at Diana and 
say A nous as they used to do a few years ago. 
That is, they no longer do so in the novels, because 
the novelists assume that no modern hero would look 
at Diana when there is a tower near by higher by 
several hundred feet. In real life I imagine the 
watchers on the benches, especially if they watch 
through the night, still find in Diana a peace which 
neither the Flatiron nor the Metropolitan can give 
them. 

From this monstrous spree of stone and brick the 
Avenue emerges like a seasoned rounder from his 
morning's cold shower, brisk and gay enough, but 
with a temporary gratification in the simpler life. 



202 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

From Madison Square to the Waldorf is the region 
of the older shops, not department stores, presided 
over not by captains of industry, but by " tradesmen/' 
The roof-line comes down to an easy height, and the 
sky follows. The windows are smart. There are 
apoplectic limousines in front of the book-shops, the 
neckwear-shops, the milliners', the boot-makers', and 
the silver-candlestick makers'. The limousines do 
not have it quite their own way. The past drives by 
in a victoria with plum-colored upholstery. Away 
from Fifth Avenue this form of vehicle is encoun- 
tered only in the quaint advertising cuts of great 
factory buildings facing on streets traversed by bob- 
tailed cars with prancing horses, and victorias with 
two ladies, one of whom holds an open parasol. 
Ladies who drive up Fifth Avenue in open carriages 
to-day always wear black, as if in mourning for an 
extinct state of civilization. 

Two or three minutes north of Madison Square the 
pavement of the Avenue grows thick with trafHc. 
From the top of a motor-'bus at this point the traveler 
looking north has before him a sight of which I do 
not know the like. An inky torrent one hundred feet 
wide pours down the slope of Murray Hill, to break 
at the foot of the Waldorf-Astoria. A flood of black- 
ened lava fills the street from curb to curb so that the 
very surface of the Avenue seems to heave and swell. 



LANE WITH NO TURNING 203 

It is the sixfold stream of motor-cars and cabs, creep- 
ing in two directions, but from a distance melting 
into one vast undulatory movement. Tossing on the 
surface of the stream^ swaying from side to side, the 
green motor-*buses breast the current, mount the 
hill, and drop over the crest of Fortieth Street out of 
sight. 

From the top of the green omnibuses I have looked 
down, I suppose, on some of the very best people in 
town without their knowing it or my knowing it. 
The 'bus is no longer a novelty in New York, but it 
is still an experience. People, for example, do not 
read newspapers on the top of an omnibus, and men 
passengers have a habit of taking off their hats for 
the air which suggests self-improvement rather than 
rapid transit. The 'bus must be good for one's 
health, but it works for self-consciousness. People 
visibly begin to brace themselves for the descent of 
the spiral staircase several blocks before their destina- 
tion, and that can hardly be good for the nerves. 
But my chief objection to the motor-'bus is on moral 
grounds. I don't know how it is with others, but 
in my own case I find that the secure possession of 
a railing seat on top of the 'bus is conducive to a 
cold superciliousness. I look down on the crowds of 
waiting shoppers at the curb and I feel that the best 
they can hope for is an inside seat on a plane quite 



204 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

below my own. They wait patiently at the curb as 
the heavy cars lumber past. They signal hope- 
fully, and make their way out into the torrent of 
traffic, only to be waved back by the conductor. The 
sense of security, the warm glow that arises from a 
vested interest, possesses me. Sometimes I am sorry 
for the disappointed shoppers that line the sidewalks 
in my wake, but there is always a touch of malice. 
At such moments I can understand Nero looking 
down from his imperial tribune in the amphitheater. 
The black tide of the Avenue runs on between banks 
of white. The cheerful note struck at the outlet of 
Madison Square by shops in white paint and cream, 
interrupted for a moment by the red mass of the 
Waldorf, is resumed in the white and cream of the 
great stores, in the gleaming walls and terraces of 
the Public Library, and continues white, with occa- 
sional out-croppings of the Early Brownstone and 
the Later Red Brick, to the end. The color key 
anticipated by the whitewashed Brevoort at Eighth 
Street and definitely struck by the Metropolitan tower 
is thereupon maintained for a distance of four miles. 
But if the color-scheme is uniform, the forms are 
infinite. As a rule our public and commercial archi- 
tecture runs to two types, the architecture that soars 
and the architecture that squats. Gothic and Greek, 
tower and temple, all or nothing, forty-five stories 



LANE WITH NO TURNING 205 

for sewing-machines and insurance, and three stories 
for banks and fine arts. Fifth Avenue has the two 
extremes in the Metropolitan tower and the spires of 
St. Patrick, and in the recumbent acres of the Public 
Library and the Metropolitan Museum. But it has 
also the intermediate types dictated by utility — the 
solid masses of great palatial stores of wide renown, 
the Genoese palace that goes by the name of Uni- 
versity Club, and the complete merging of the two 
ideals — or rather, of all ideals — in the vast bulk of 
the Plaza, which is Gothic in height, Babylonian in 
depth, Greek in color, and therefore typically 
American. 



IV 



The outcome of the struggle between trade and 
residence for the possession of Fifth Avenue below 
Central Park has not been in doubt for some years. 
Trade has won, but the last shots have not been fired. 
The art dealers, the real-estate men, and the milliners 
have reached the Park. A few families that are old 
enough and rich enough to touch commerce without 
being defiled are barricaded for a last stand. But 
what chance have such snipers, even if it is for the 
defense of hearth and home? The artillery of heavy 
rents will be trained against their walls and the shop- 



206 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

ping crowds in solid formation will advance to the 
assault. The old residences will go, and after them 
the clubs. The hotels will probably hold out for 
years to come. Longest of all will stand the churches 
— for several generations, perhaps. 

In the evolution of New York's thoroughfares it is 
the churches that remain as monuments of the con- 
tinuous struggle for survival, whether it is a struggle 
between residential district and business district, or 
between the private mansion and the apartment-house, 
or between different populations. The physiognomy 
of neighborhoods changes, but the churches remain 
in good number, imbedded in different strata — in 
shops, clubs, apartment-houses, tenements — for the 
social geologist to use as material in reconstruction 
of the past. The history of Fifth Avenue as far north 
as Central Park must be largely written on the basis 
of such documents in brick and stone as the First 
Presbyterian at Eleventh Street, the Marble Col- 
legiate at Twenty-ninth Street, the Brick Presby- 
terian with its absurd sugar-loaf steeple of pinkish 
stone all covered with carbuncles at Thirty-seventh 
Street. Old families go and leave their churches 
behind them as filaments with the past, as memorials, 
or as missions for the encroaching heathen. More 
than that, they build churches in neighborhoods that 
are manifestly doomed to trade or cheap residence. 



LANE WITH NO TURNING 207 

The faith of the medieval cathedral builders who 
wrought for eternity is reflected in the faith that 
only ten years ago erected Dr. Parkhurst's chruch in 
the heart of the garment trade, or St. Thomas's, in 
a region of shops. 

The churches on Fifth Avenue confirm its represen- 
tative character as the show-window of the city, a 
window that exhibits the entire life of the city — 
factories, shops, oflSces, hotels, clubs, its luxuries and 
simplicities — yes, even the longing for the primitive 
finds expression on Fifth Avenue in the white-front 
tea-rooms with chintz curtains and home-made pastry, 
quite like the simple joys of rural life the court of 
Versailles used to delight in. In this national show- 
window, religion is strongly on exhibition, though the 
furnaces and warehouses of the faith, speaking in 
all reverence, may be situated far from Fifth Avenue. 
The great population mass of whose creed St. Patrick's 
is the most notable symbol in stone, for example, lies 
fairly remote, east of Third Avenue and west of 
Eighth Avenue. The great bulk of the Jewish popula- 
tion lies five miles to the south and two miles to the 
north from the green-and-gold dome of the Beth-el 
Temple. But St. Patrick's and Beth-el are testimony 
to the important place that the faiths which they 
symbolize have won in the sun. Even religion does 
not disdain the cachet of Fifth Avenue. 



208 BELSHAZZAE COURT 

For a mile and a half north of Fifty-ninth Street 
stretches the Fifth Avenue of tradition. It is 
Millionaires' Row, looking out on the green of 
Central Park and its great simplicities — the lake 
where children ride in swan-boats, the menagerie, 
the asphalt paths covered with a heavy traffic of 
baby-carts and the children on donkey-back, the pond 
where other children sail their miniature craft. The 
Park, I imagine, has sensibly affected the architecture 
of the homes across the way. Their prevalent white 
and cream blends with the green of the foliage. The 
street is gay, for the most part in a lordly way, 
with fine windows framed in rich lace carving, but 
now and then positively coquettish in pink and white 
and gold. Of the pain and pleasure that architects 
experience when they walk up Fifth Avenue I can 
say little. Except for a survival here and there of 
the Early Brownstone period, and one or two examples 
of the Late Grotesque, the street pleases me. Con- 
noisseurs, I suppose, deplore its lack of uniformity. 
The roof-line is jagged when compared with the Ave- 
nue de Bois de Boulogne, and the facades do not melt 
into one another. But here is the difficulty in all our 
striving for higher things in art in this country. If 
the Pittsburg rich give their architects a free hand, 
we accuse them of buying their esthetic ideals whole- 
sale. When they build according to their own ideas 



LANE WITH NO TURNING 209 

we call them barbarians. On the one hand we expect 
them to express their own personality, and on the 
other we expect them to express themselves beauti- 
fully. If here or there on Fifth Avenue one discerns 
under a single roof specimens of the Assyrian, 
the French Renaissance, and the California Mission, 
the thing has its significance. Why not give the 
architect of this amazing mess the credit for doing 
what Sargent does — reveal the soul of the inhabitant 
through its tenement of granite, marble, and green 
slate? 

At any rate, the way to perfect beauty on the 
Avenue is not through flat, long, low Roman structures 
in marble. I don't know how Mr. Frick's new 
Roman basilica on the site of the old Lenox Library 
measures up as an example of absolute architecture. 
I do not find it beautiful in itself, and it is absurd 
as a human habitation. After all, Alcibiades did not 
have lodgings in the Parthenon, and there is no 
reason why any one man, no matter how wealthy, 
should make his home in a structure obviously 
intended for the United States Supreme Court. I 
understand, of course, that the dwellings of the very 
rich are virtually restricted nowadays to a picture- 
gallery, a museum, and a swimming-tank, but it must 
be somebody's fault if with that there cannot be incor- 
porated some suggestion at least of a home. Other- 



210 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

wise I submit that there is danger of the megaphone 
men on the sight-seeing wagons pointing out the Frick 
mansion as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the 
Art Museum as the Frick mansion. Not that it 
would make any appreciable difference to the sight- 
seers^ but a dangerous architectural tradition might 
be perpetuated in Kanses. After all, the problem of 
combining the museum and the hearth has been solved 
in Europe by the simple method of building a resi- 
dence and then transforming it through the accumu- 
lation of years into a museum, and not the other way 
around. 

Just a mile separates the Roman basilica at Seven- 
tieth Street, which Mr. Frick built, from the ducal 
palace at Ninetieth Street, which Mr. Carnegie built. 
Not content with the splendid front yard of eight 
hundred acres supplied free of cost by the city, both 
men built themselves gardens of their own. Mr. 
Frick*s lawn with its low marble balustrade was in- 
tended as a foreground. Mr. Carnegie's finished 
garden with its high iron fence aimed at privacy. 
Lawn seed and flower-beds must come high on 
the Avenue, but I presume it was the desire 
to fix permanently the residential character of 
the vicinage that prompted what would be elsewhere 
on the Avenue regarded as waste of space. Gardens 
on Fifth Avenue create a real-estate proposition 



LANE WITH NO TURNING 211 

before which the most ambitious milliner or jewelry- 
shop will hesitate for many years to come. 

Business may be some time in forcing an entrance 
into Millionaires* Row, but one form of change is 
already at work to show that time will have its way 
with the proudest of residential neighborhoods. Ex- 
actly half-way between Mr. Frick and Mr. Carnegie 
stands the pioneer apartment-house on Fifth Avenue^ 
at Eighty-first Street. It faces the central pavilion 
of the Metropolitan Museum, thus presenting our 
favorite architectural combination of several hundred 
feet of masonry shooting up in the air right next door 
to several hundred feet of granite trailing close to 
the soil. If you laid this apartment-house on its 
side and stood the Metropolitan Museum on one end, 
the harmony would be precisely the same. Blank 
and ugly from the outside, I understand that within 
this structure, which the building laws of New York 
describe as a tenement -house, there are ceilings from 
Venice, and oak panelings from the English counties, 
and suites of enormous numbers of rooms exactly 
described in the Sunday supplements. Despite its 
claims on the grounds of costliness, the apartment 
house on upper Fifth Avenue is now being rejected as 
a menace to beauty; quite like the garment factories 
on lower Fifth Avenue. 

At Carnegie Hill is the climax. Three or four 



212 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

blocks beyond the hill the scattered pioneers of the 
northward migration of the rich rear their lonely 
roofs over vacant lots. Then comes an area of 
dreary board fences. On its own side of the Avenue 
the Park keeps bravely on. It can wait. But glanc- 
ing east down the side-streets of the Avenue itself 
there is nothing. The view is of a hinterland of 
tenements, and instead of clean stretches of asphalt 
to Park Avenue, the pavement is alive with children. 
At 100th Street the Mount Sinai Hospital would 
seem to mark the ultimate limit of millionaire expan- 
sion. Beyond are more advertising fences. We must 
be content with the greenhouses in Central Park, the 
lovely rise of land to the Reservoir, and the waters 
of Harlem Mere, until we reach, once more on the 
east side of the Avenue, the first definite sign of a 
new civilization, the moving-picture theater of which 
I spoke at the beginning. 

Four blocks more and Central Park says farewell 
to Fifth Avenue and turns west. So do the green 
motor-'buses. But the Avenue itself, five and a 
quarter miles from its source, has still some life in it. 
Without turning a hair, it runs on, looking neither to 
right nor left, through the heart of the great Harlem 
Ghetto, until at Mount Morris Park it runs its head 
slap into a castellated hillock that would be a very 
respectable height on the Rhine, the loftiest point in 



LANE WITH NO TURNING 213 

central Manhattan. At 124th Street the little park 
stops and the Avenue has recovered itself. For a 
quarter-mile or so it passes through the brownstone 
of the half-way-up middle classes, now giving way 
before the boarding-houses. Then comes half a mile 
of dingy tenements, with little of the lights and crowd 
and babel of the Ghetto below Mount Morris Park. 
And then, as Mr. Kipling might say, the Harlem 
River takes it. 



X 

DOWN-TOWN 



There is a region of mystery into which the 
metropolitan husband and father vanishes between 
7.30 and 8.45 a.m. six days in the week and from 
which he emerges in the late afternoon. He is wel- 
comed, after the manner of all returning warriors, 
with a tender solicitude. Down-Town is the track- 
less jungle into which Father plunges to stalk the 
family's living. After ten thousand years of civiliza- 
tion it is still the same. Anxious eyes follow him 
from the wig^vam till he turns the corner to the rail- 
road station, and fond eyes greet him as he staggers 
out of the elevator door with his prey, so to speak, 
on his shoulder. Wives will never be reconciled to 
Down-Town. It swallows up the man of the house 
when he would much rather stay at home and play 
with the children — so he pretends — and it sends himi 
home at night too tired to be agreeable — as he as- 
serts. Thus the little game goes on. The primitive 
214 



D O W N - T O W N 216 

hunter, I imagine, made believe that he hated to 
leave the family and go off into the dark forest; 
and on his return he threw himself before the fire, 
too tired to speak. Actually, I believe, the primitive 
hunter, as soon as he was out of sight of home, 
broke into a cheerful whistle. 

Sometimes there must flit across the mind of the 
woman who stays at home the doubt whether it is 
such a dreadful thing, after all, to have to go Down- 
Town every day. It may be a place of toil and 
peril for her poor warrior; but it seems rather an 
attractive place, to judge from the picture post-cards 
of New York's sky-line, which always means the 
sky-line of Down-Town. Intelligent foreigners look 
for the soul of New York in the sky-scraper region, 
and not only the soul of the city, but of America. 
Artists who would savor the beauty of New York 
find it in the same sky-line of towers and battle- 
ments, fresh in the mists of the morning, or ablaze 
with a hundred thousand lights at night. They 
have found beauty in the separate domes and shafts 
and fortresses; in the Babylonian brick piles of the 
Terminal Buildings, in the gold and ivory fluting of 
the Woolworth, in the frosted silver of the Singer 
Tower, 

It is true that the picture post-cards show parts 
of New York that are not Down-Town — the parks, 



216 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

the cathedrals, the museums, the railway stations. 
But the woman who stays at home reflects that she 
does not spend her working-hours in Central Park or 
in the Metropolitan Museum, whereas her husband 
does do business in a Gothic cathedral that goes by 
the name of Woolworth. Artists in search of the 
beauty of New York never come around to the 
apartment house on the upper West Side where 
woman transacts business with the cook. They go 
down for inspiration to the Venetian campanile on 
the twenty-sixth floor of which her husband sells 
railway supplies. 

Her suspicions are well foimded. Down-Town 
is a pleasant place which the male New-Yorker has 
arrogated to himself. To guard it against his women- 
folk he has thrown about it the taboo of an evil 
reputation. He has made it into a stuffy, ugly, im- 
clean corner of the city that is fit only for the 
ignoble business of money-getting. Whereas the fact 
is that only a very small portion of the art and 
literature and thought of mankind has been created 
amid such attractive surroundings as shelter the 
money-grubbers of New York. It is different with 
the gloomy courts and alleys of London's financial 
district. Our own Down-Town has skies as clear as 
those that look down on the most desirable of New 
Jersey suburbs; streets that are swept by the wind 



DOWN -TOWN 217 

from two rivers and a bay which are nowhere more 
than half a mile away; the sight of great ships put- 
ting out to sea ; a glimpse of hills across the Hudson ; 
the heavy rush of crowds in the streets — and romance. 
Not the machine-made " romance of business/' about 
which we have heard so much, but real romance — 
old streets, old houses, old markets, old cemeteries, 
old eating-houses, history at every corner, marble 
towers and dark alleys, Greek temples that are na- 
tional banks, and low, dark, moist shops where com- 
muters buy the raw materials for their gardens. 

Down-Town is an area of not much more than a 
quarter of a square mile in the form of a triangle, 
with its base at Chambers Street and its point at 
Bowling Green. Along the base are clustered the 
City Hall, the courts, and the newspaper-offices, 
and at the apex is Mr. Rockefeller's place of busi- 
ness; I am not striving for symbolism. From base 
to tip runs Broadway for a distance of four-fifths 
of a mile. 

Now it is precisely in the very heart of Business, 
surrounded by such thin abstractions as Finance, 
Insurance, Law, and the Press, that most of the real, 
concrete, and ancient institutions and values of life 
in New York have maintained themselves. Take the 
street orator, for example. In season, of course, 
he flourishes all over the city. But I am not think- 



218 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

ing of the political spellbinder, who has his brief 
four weeks of bloom and vanishes. Even the I. W, 
W. orator and the Socialist orator have their times 
and occasions and limitations. I am thinking, rather, 
of the man without an organization or a campaign 
fmid who asks you for only five minutes of your 
lunch-hour to demonstrate the process of the soul 
through the Seven Planes of Existence to its conflu- 
ence with the Universal Soul. If the thing isn't quite 
clear in the course of five minutes, you buy a pamph- 
let for the nominal price of five cents, printed by 
the author and heavily interlined in his own hand- 
writing. Down-Town has an extraordinary interest 
in, and toleration for, the New Thought, for the 
Single Tax, and for the explanation of the European 
war in terms of Revelation. It indicates a degree 
of spirituality in the people of Down-Town which 
you do not find among the theater crowds on Broad- 
way or the shoppers on Fifth Avenue. The people 
up-town are worldly wise, and when they are con- 
fronted with something out of the ordinary they 
suspect an advertisement. If a man in a linen duster 
and a straw hat were to take his stand in Times 
Square on a November afternoon, people would at 
once think of chewing-gum or the new show at the 
Hippodrome. But the crowds on Wall Street and 
in Brooklyn Bridge plaza will guess that the man 



DOWN-TOWN 219 

in the straw hat has found out something new about 
the way of the sun around the earth. Preachers 
with a universal mission know they are assured of a 
kindly liearing among the simple-hearted crowds 
around the Post OflSce. 

For it is with the street faker as with the comer 
orator. Up-town he is a sporadic phenomenon 
brought forth by a special occasion — a Birth Control 
parade, an Americanization parade, the arrival 
of the Atlantic fleet. But Down-Town the Stock 
Exchange is no more permanent and regular an in- 
stitution than the men who sell gold eye-glasses at 
twenty-five cents the pair. They sell card tricks, 
mechanical rabbits and mice, airships, miniature bag- 
pipes, and ingenious ink-bottles with large attached 
rubber ink-stains to take home and put on the white 
table-cloth and disconcert your wife. Modern, hygi- 
enic parents, after a thorough training in individual 
drinking-cups, pasteurized milk, filtered air, her- 
metically sealed handkerchiefs, and bread loaves un- 
touched by human hands, will purchase a harmonica 
on Broadway which has been pawed by half a 
hundred hands and tested perhaps by a dozen mouths, 
and carry it home to their thoroughly sterilized off- 
spring. 



220 BELSHAZZAR COURT 



More than anywhere else it is Down-Town that 
you will find people flattening their noses against 
window-panes and peering at the two exhibits that 
men have flattened their noses against for thousands 
of years, as they will continue to do until the world's 
end — namely, new flowers and old books. The seed- 
catalogue and the book-catalogue flourish side by side 
on Vesey Street — California privet and the Essays of 
Montaigne, garden hose at so much a foot and the 
ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Paris- 
green for spraying and Balzac. Sometimes these two 
permanent interests of humanity blend, as when the 
book-stalls exhibit Chicken Raising at a Profit, or 
The Commuter's Garden, at twenty-five cents a copy. 

It is strange. Up-town, where are university clubs 
and art-galleries and leisure and culture, the florist's 
shop suggests chiefly money; and Down-Town, where 
men come only for the making of money, the garden 
shops are suggestive of the great, simple, and eternal 
things — of small hedges and lawns, the soil and its 
rich population of garden pests, seeds and bulbs and 
roots, planting and grafting and trimming and prun- 
ing. The up-town florist represents the wastage of 
things, and the Down-Town garden man represents 
the creation of things. If the conscientious citizen 



DOWN-TOWN 221 

is ever impelled to teach his son the primitive mystery 
of how things are born and grow, he must take his 
son by the hand and bring him down to within a 
quarter of a mile from Wall Street and half a block 
from Broadway, and let him peer into the shop 
windows with their fresh, green squares of lawn sod, 
the onions which are really bulbs and will one day 
be lilies, the little gravel window-gardens where yel- 
low chicks scratch for a living like so many stock- 
brokers, puppies frisking or blinking in wire inclos- 
ures, and incubators. 

And it is no less odd about the book-stalls. Up- 
town the booksellers' windows are crammed with 
the " latest ** ; the latest of Wells, Strachey, Romain 
Holland, Conrad, Tchekoff, Harold Bell Wright, 
Irvin Cobb, Kathleen Norris, the war and peace 
men, the efficiency engineers, the success howlers, all 
the names and titles you saw last Saturday in the 
publishers' notices or read about in the Literary 
Notes, technically known to us in the profession as 
" slush." But the classics are good enough for the 
money-diggers, the tired business men, the cutthroat 
competitors of Down-Town. Balzac, Epictetus, 
Benjamin Franklin, Thackeray, Thomas Paine, 
Walter Scott, Voltaire, and the standard encyclo- 
paedias are the bulk of the Down-Town shopkeeper's 
trade; together, it is true, with books on poultry 



222 BELSHAZZAE COURT 

raising, card games, one hundred selected parlor 
tricks, and files of famous magazines for 1886 or 
thereabouts. In other words, the traditional, solid 
literary virtues have their stronghold in the shadow 
of the sky-scrapers. The romance of the sky-scrapers 
is sung by new novelists and poets, whose works are 
to be had chiefly in the book-shops on Fifth Avenue. 
The people of the sky-scrapers themselves read 
Carlyle and Browning, Byron and Shelley, and I am 
afraid they read Owen Meredith's Lucille, 

I think I have shown cause why wives must not 
waste sympathy on husbands who depart by the 8.08 
from Hohokus or the 8.42 from 125th Street for a 
hard day in an ugly, drab, debilitating region known 
as Down-Town. That husband is really bound for 
a delectable place and one that is soaked in history. 
Down-Town is not so ancient a place as London's 
Cheapside, but neither is New York as old as London. 
Down-Town as compared with up-town is relatively 
as venerable as Bishopsgate or Spitalfields compared 
with Piccadilly. Largely it is a matter of nomen- 
clature. If, instead of saying Trinity Church, we 
said Trinity-by-' Change, and instead of saying St, 
Paul's Chapel we said St. Paul-in-Park Row, the 
truth would be immediately perceived. New York 
has what London has not — two large graveyards in 
the heart of the financial district where the " clerks ** 



DOWN-TOWN 223 

eat their luncheon in summer on the greensward 
among the tombs; two churches from whose doors 
priestly processions issue and circulate in full view 
of the crowds. Possibly the " City " of London can 
show quaint old women in bead-work capes and 
shawls like those who flit about in the early morning 
under the shadow of the " L ** on Church Street, or 
along the short stretch of Barclay Street from Broad- 
way west which is given over half to dealers in the 
furniture of the Roman Catholic Church, and half to 
the seed-and-garden stores. And the juxtaposition 
of seeds, flowers, grain-stocks, shrubbery, with 
priestly vestments, golden crowns, crosses and cen- 
sers, is a combination, one imagines, which St. Francis 
would have liked. 

Neither, O gentle housewife of the suburbs and 
upper West Side, give too much thought to the un- 
happy money-toiler who must spend part of his day 
away from home-cooking. He is not so absorbed with 
the chase of the dollar but that he has found time 
and inclination for a substantial noonday meal. The 
business man has been fast assimilating the European 
habit of dining heartily at midday and with decorum. 
You will find a few irreconcilables who sincerely 
deplore the passing of the historic luncheon-counter 
in the Astor House rotunda. The great number re- 
gret the Astor House lunch-counter in the same spirit 



224 BELSHAZZAR C O U a T 

that most of us yearn for the simple life of the 
forefathers^ entirely as a matter of piety. The eating- 
houses on Pulton Street are very much more like 
Merrie England than like our own pioneer days. 
The carcasses of deer hang in season before the door. 
In the windows there are suckling pigs on beds of 
celery, great rounds of beef, and enormous fishes on 
ice. The tired business man manages to put in an 
hour and a half over the intricacies of the French 
menu or the heavier portions of the German restau- 
rants. He likes his food flavored with history. His 
English mutton chop is broiled on an open iire before 
his eyes, and he eats it quite like Dr. Johnson in an 
alcove with straight -backed pews, mustard and pickles 
ladled out of a great jar, and Stilton digged out 
of the soil. He likes the religious cool of the rath- 
skeller with the coats of arms and convivial mottoes 
on walls and ceiling. He takes his ease in his inn, 
he has his ale and his cakes, and makes no claims on 
our pity. 

Plainly there is need for revising our notions of 
the pressure of business life in America, when one 
thinks of the luncheon clubs which pre-empt the top 
floors on the newest sky-scrapers and the noblest 
views on the two rivers and the bay. The traveler 
from Mars — and when you come to think of it, these 
luncheon clubs on the top of the sky-scrapers would 



D O W N - T O W N 225 

be the first place a traveler direct from Mars would 
naturally strike — might be inclined to argue that a 
people whose business men went in for luncheon on 
so imperial a scale was a nation decadent, and that 
before long it would be outbidden in the markets of 
the world by nations with simpler feeding habits. 
Acres of carpeted space agleam with white napery 
and silver, expensive art upon the walls, and well- 
groomed men over elaborate dishes, might suggest the 
land of the dollar, but not the land of hustle. I am 
aware of a tradition that these Lucullan dining-rooms 
are not intended primarily for eating, that the two- 
hour luncheons are really occasions for putting 
through all sorts of transactions, combinations, deals, 
mergers, and consolidations. But I suspect that this 
is largely a fiction created by the New York business 
man for the soothing of his conscience. He pretends 
to make a virtue of the practice. He would persuade 
himself that he is so very busy that he gives even 
his luncheon-hour to business; but it is mathematics 
that two hours of food and business can never be 
equal to a quarter-hour of food and an hour and 
three-quarters of business as it was in the days of 
the fathers. 



226 BELSHAZZAR COURT 



III 



American art has gone in heavily for the sky- 
scraper, but I cannot help feeling that the painters 
and etchers who have come Down-Town for romance 
have rather forced the sentiment. They have trans- 
lated lower New York into the same idiom that they 
employ for Paris or Fiesole. To the artist's eye, I 
suppose, the white glare of our new sky-scrapers is 
a trial, the razor-edge of the outlines, the sheer 
heights, the clear-cut masses, are an abomination. 
For the artist, I suppose, lines ought to waver in- 
stead of shooting up three hundred feet like a plumb- 
line, and mighty structures ought to loom instead of 
hitting one in the eye. So they have softened and 
aged Down-Town into a hazy impressionism and 
away from the truth. They have done with the tall 
office-buildings what they have done with the Pitts- 
burg chimneys and the locks and dredges at Panama ; 
they have veiled New York in a cloud. They have 
employed the same technique of shadow and blur 
for the Terminal Buildings that they use for Notre 
Dame, endeavoring to impart to a mountain of white 
marble in our clear New York air the atmosphere of 
old Gothic stone in the mists of the Seine. This is 
too easy a method of attaining beauty, this dexterous 
use of crayon and burin which makes one problem 



DOWN-TOWN 227 

of the great trust-company building on Wall Street 
and a clapboard cottage on a New England road. 

And, in any case, they have dealt only with ex- 
ternals. The soul of the sky-scraper is where all our 
souls are — if we have any — on the inside. We must 
follow the crowd which swirls through the vast and 
gorgeous lobbies. In this organism which we call 
the sky-scraper, the lobby, with its painted ceiling, 
its glow of marble and onyx and lapislazuli, and its 
crowds, would be the heart, the great pumping- 
station for the entire circulatory system. The eleva- 
tors are the arteries. I do not know whence the 
masterful men are drawn who stand in the lobbies 
and direct the departure of the cars in the twenty 
elevator shafts — you to the eleventh floor first stop, 
you to the nineteenth floor first stop, you to the 
fortieth floor first stop — but I suspect they must be 
recruited from the transport department of the 
European armies, the men who sent off ten thousand 
men at 3.41 to Verdun and a couple of brigades at 
3.56 to Lemberg. 

The nerves of the sky-scraper are the telephone 
wires, of course. And, inasmuch as progress in evolu- 
tion is measured by complex nervous development, it 
is natural that New York's Down-Town, where 
Business, the highest form of social biology, has at- 
tained its fullest development, should be an enormous 



228 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

spider's web of telephone wires. Turn to the back 
pages of your magazine and very likely you will find 
a statement by the telephone company showing that 
the per capita consumption of telephone wire in 
New York is six times as much as in London. That 
represents the relative nervous intensity of business 
in New York and in London. Obviously it cannot 
mean that New York does six times as much business 
as London. But there is no necessary relation be- 
tween nerves and productivity. You meet people all 
the time who are one mass of tingling telephone wires ; 
they frequently are the high-strung women and men 
who are so high-strung as to be comparatively use- 
less for the business of the world. 

Some such excess of wiring I suspect in the sky- 
scrapers of Down-Town. It used to be a favorite 
fancy with old writers to strip the roofs from the 
houses of a great city and to study the life of man 
as it went on in the exposed cells. It would hardly 
pay a ghostly observer to strip the roof from the 
Equitable Building, since below the top story there 
are forty other floors which would still be concealed 
from him. For a study of Down-Town it is better 
to imagine one of the walls removed. And what 
would one see then ? This : Hundreds and thousands 
of rooms^ and in every room one or more men with 
their mouths and ears at the telephone. It is all 



DOWN-TOWN 229 

cellular partitions and wire ganglions reaching out to 
Chicago, perhaps, or San Francisco; wires to the 
Stock Exchange around the corner, wires to the assist- 
ant in the adjoining room, wires to the heart of the 
dictaphone into which Business is being dictated and 
from which Business will travel to the ear of the 
stenographer who will transfer it to paper. Our 
ghostly tourist, studying Down-To^vn through the 
missing w^all, will conclude that modern Business is 
a matter of conversation. And that, after all, is 
what the experts tell you. Business, they say, is 
Credit. That is, if a man calls you up on the wire 
and you believe him, it is credit; and the less time 
he must consume in order to make himself believed, 
the greater a business man he is. 



IT 



Down-Town, inside of its tens of thousands of sky- 
scraper cells, is thus terribly busy — about what? So 
far as the eye can see, about nothing in particular. 
A man with a telephone at his elbow, a flat-topped 
desk with a metal basket holding a dozen letters 
perhaps, a photograph of the man*s wife in a silver 
frame at one end of the desk, and that is all. But 
if the cell is a large one, sometimes reaching the 
dimensions of an entire floor in a sky-scraper block. 



230 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

the desks, telephones, metal baskets, and photographs 
are indefinitely multiplied. The substantialities of 
Business are not there — the steel, wheat, cotton, bul- 
lion, the beams, casks, boxes, and bales which you 
recall being hauled toward quaint little wharfs on 
toy trucks driven by men in jumpers and shovel-hats 
in the pictures in your school geography labeled 
Commerce. By externals there is no way of telling 
whether the man at the desk is engaged in selling 
stocks and bonds, or woolen remnants, or railway 
accessories, or trusts and mergers, or theater tickets. 
There is lacking the concrete symbolism of the old 
counting-rooms — the heavy ledgers, whose bulk sug- 
gested the raw materials of traffic, the clerks on their 
high stools, the bustle of orders given and taken. 
The heavy ledgers have been replaced by filing- 
cabinets, whose purpose seems as much decorative 
as useful. Your business office might as well be the 
catalogue room of a college library. 

Your view of the cellular life going on inside the 
sky-scrapers confirms your impression of the sky- 
scrapers from the outside, and of the great mobs that 
swirl over the sidewalks or inundate the narrow chan- 
nel of Nassau Street from building-wall to building- 
wall, like a street in Constantinople. It is a vast 
factory plant of marble and granite palaces and a 
millon people engaged in producing nothing tangible. 



DOWN -TOWN 231 

The multitude which flows down Broadway from 
Brooklyn Bridge between eight and nine in the 
morning and flows north to the Bridge between five 
and six at night consists entirely of people, so you 
say to yourself, who make a living by calling one 
another up on the telephone. And then all at once 
it occurs to you that what you see is only the nerve 
center of a nation. The heavy physiological pro- 
cesses, alimentation and digestion and circulation, 
tissue building and destruction, organic play and 
breakdown — these all are located outside of Down- 
Town as far back as the Pacific coast and the Gulf 
of Mexico. Superficial moralists tell you that to 
know the real greatness of America you must leave 
New York and go out to the fields, the prairies, the 
forests and hills and lakes and rivers. But in this 
way you will never see more than a small portion of 
America, and you will never be able to piece the 
fragments together into a single picture. You can 
only visualize America by strolling down from City 
Hall to Bowling Green and saying to yourself. How 
great must be America to maintain a million people 
and four hundred acres of office-buildings forty stories 
high in the occupation of talking through the tele- 
phone and pulling out cabinet files! A single office- 
building on Broadway has twenty-thousand square 
miles of America working for its support. 



BELSHAZZAR COURT 

But this parasitism on a scale such as the world 
has never seen, this conglomerate of towers, pinnacles, 
fortresses, Greek temples and Mesopotamian brick- 
piles, all devoted to a traffic in abstractions, is not all 
of Down-Town, as I have previously intimated. East 
of Nassau Street to the river lies the old New York 
which is still engaged in creating visible, tangible, 
smellable products in dingy brick houses aligned 
along the ancient cow-paths of the Knickerbockers, 
Here are machine-shops, chemical laboratories, ware- 
houses, soap, rubber, leather, paper, paints, and inks. 
In the shadow of a twenty-story structure devoted to 
the worship of a highly abstract deity called Insur- 
ance, both Fire and Marine, are the trucks and drays 
of Commerce carrying the boxes, casks, and bales 
which one has missed so badly nearer to Broadway. 
Here is a business of hauling, shoving, lifting, ham- 
mering, carried on by stout arms. The hand-truck 
and the bill-hook replace the telephone. The narrow, 
ill-paved streets, the sagging sidewalks, the Georgian 
lintels and window-frames are what Dickens would 
have liked. The streets curl and twist in the craziest 
way, but manage to end in something solid, primitive, 
intrinsically valuable, like the great bulk of the 
Brooklyn Bridge on its stone viaduct, or the river 
with real ships in it and docks piled high with real, 
heavy freight. On the water-front is Fulton Market ; 



D O W N - T O W N 233 

and what greater relief there can be after the empti- 
ness of the Stock Exchange than a' fish market, I 
can not imagine. 

West of Broadway to the North River, Down-Town 
becomes even more real, more primitive. First come 
the seedsmen and the florists of whom I have already 
spoken. They merge into the river-front and a great 
belt given up entirely to food. From Washington 
Market north along the avenues for a mile lies the 
stomach of New York. Here the traffic is of the 
golidest kind one could wish. Great trucks drawn by 
monstrous horses block the streets, or, backed up 
along the loading platforms of the warehouses, occupy 
the sidewalks — except that the sidewalks here are not 
for walking. They are the remnant of a time when 
these were largely residential streets, or else they are 
a concession to civic standards of street improvement ; 
for these are not really streets, but great flumes 
choked with the food of a city. So much does it take 
to put life into a million people that they may be 
enabled to go down to their offices and call one 
another on the telephone. 

If you walk far enough south through the food 
markets west of Broadway, or the leather and soap 
and paper markets east of Broadway, the configura- 
tion of Manhattan Island will soon force you back 
toward Broadway and Finance, out of the romance 



234 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

of real things into the romance of abstractions. I 
take back such doubts as I have cast on the romance 
of big business. It exists, but not in the form people 
usually discover. Those who would find romance 
inside the office-buildings have really been using 
ancient material. Since romance has historically been 
concerned with kings and princes and discoverers and 
pioneers, we have written much of kings of finance 
and princes of business, of men who stand silent upon 
sunlit peaks in Wall Street and see great visions. 

Especially the vision. When a railroad king dies, 
we speak of the dream that came to a young railroad 
clerk, of empires to be built up out of the unoccupied 
lands of the great West. The obituary writers as- 
sure us that this young man's eye, reaching in the 
future, saw what no other man saw — saw a million 
farms on the empty prairies, cities at the junction of 
great rivers, the mountains conquered, the earth 
made to disgorge its treasures, the forests humbled 
and reduced. And when the king of finance dies we 
learn how to him, too, as a poor bank clerk, came 
the vision of a nation's potential wealth and the 
enormous masses of credit that could be piled up on 
those riches, and the channels by which that credit 
could be made to flow. He foresaw that entire system 
of financial drainage by which the rivulets run into 
the local bank reservoirs, and then into a chain of 



DOWN-TOWN 235 

banks, and from there into trust companies and amal- 
gamations of trust companies and national banks, 
holding companies, insurance companies, alliances, 
kingdoms, and empires of finance; all this the poor 
bank clerk is supposed to have foreseen. And when 
the great merchant dies we hear of the vision of 
great department stores that came to the salesman 
behind the coiuiter; and the vision of a thousand 
five-and-ten-cent shops that culminated in six hundred 
and twelve feet of Gothic temple at Broadway and 
Barclay Street ; and of the vision of a thousand drug- 
stores and tobacco-stores, selling drugs and tobacco 
to a nation under one commander. In such visions 
of the American business man there would surely be 
romance enough. 

Only I am convinced that this theory of the empire- 
building, world-conquering vision of the American 
business man is false. It seems to me to misinterpret 
the spirit of America to speak of her business men 
as foreseeing things. For the secret of the American 
spirit is not foresight, but energy. We do not build 
in accordance with a gigantic blue-print, but we build 
with all one's strength and beyond one's strength, 
in the simple faith that it will all be well. Often it 
is not even faith, but simply the taking of a gambler's 
chance, the willingness to risk everything for a great 
prize without clearly visualizing the prize. Faith 



236 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

does not depend upon vision, but by definition believes 
in the unseen. Optimism would not be optimism if 
it played a sure thing. I do not think of James J. 
Hill as pulled forward by the vision of a Northwest 
empire, but as driven forward by an energy which in 
its unfolding produced the empire of the Northwest. 
I do not think that Woolworth foresaw a chain of a 
thousand retail shops, but that he was swept forward 
into a career of unlimited expansion by the boundless 
national energy operating upon the limitless wealth 
of the nation. Our incentive is not the goal, but the 
race. 

This may be stripping something of the halo from 
the kings who sit over their telephones Down-Town, 
but it only adds to the wonder of the national energy 
which makes such kings, which seizes them in its 
flood and carries them far beyond the reach of their 
visions. The romance of Down-TowTi is there, but it 
is less the romance of kings and princes of finance 
than of America herself. 



XI 

THE SHOPPERS 



In the list of New York's public buildings rarely do 
you find any mention of Gibson's. Viewed in the 
cold light of the tax-rolls, Gibson's is a department 
store, and so a private enterprise. Actually it is 
much more a part of the public life of the city than 
the Library on Fifth Avenue. No one would think 
of omitting the Pennsylvania Terminal from a study 
of New York, though that granite palace is only a 
booth for the sale of tickets to Rahway, Trenton, and 
San Francisco. The crowds pass through a rail- 
way terminal, but they abide in Gibson's by the hour. 
The terminal is an entrance and an exit, whereas 
Gibson's is a social institution. There is no folk 
psychology bound up with a railway station in a big 
town, however it may be in those places where the 
leading citizens congregate on the platform to see the 
trains pass. Gibson's is not only a place, but a force 
237 



238 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

for good and evil, as we shall see. The genitive 
case shows how it is embedded in the common life. 
It is not Gibson's Department Store, but simple 
Gibson's, Smith's, Jones's. It is more intimately- 
related to the life of the community than that other 
great national genitive, Childs's. 

Why it isn't Gibson's Bazaar I have never quite 
understood, I am aware that *' bazaar " smacks of 
the small town where they also have ** emporiums." 
But, on the other hand, nothing can be uglier than 
" department store." It is ugly and it is bad busi- 
ness. If travelers do not speak of department 
stores as they do of the bazaars of the Orient, it 
must be because of the impossible name. For Gib- 
son's, as I have said, is not a store where things are 
merely sold, but actually a bazaar; that is to say, a 
meeting-place as well as a barter-place, a communal 
center, a democratic force. Consequently the owner 
has himself to blame if travelers look for the life of 
India in the bazaars at Benares and for the life of 
a little Macedonian village in its market-place but 
seldom think of looking for the life of New York 
behind the great plate-glass windows on Fifth 
Avenue. Or take the Stock Exchange. They print 
pictures of the Stock Exchange on post-cards, and 
visitors climb the gallery to look down on a national 
phenomenon. Yet what the Stock Exchange is to 



THE SHOPPERS 239 

Economic Man the department stores are to Economic 
Woman. Only the hideous name stands in the way. 

Gibson's qualifies as a public building by its signif- 
icance ; it certainly qualifies by its size. Any one of its 
floors is larger than most market-places in Merrie 
England. It offers you a spectacle with which only 
the cathedrals and the railway terminals and the 
Metropolitan Opera House can compare. But it 
combines all the separate qualities of these monster 
buildings into an unparalleled effect. The Opera 
House has color and sound, but no motion. The 
terminals have sound and motion, but no color. The 
Library and the cathedrals have spaciousness, but 
no crowds. Gibson's has them all. It spreads out, 
glows, and reverberates. An hour in Gibson's, and 
you bring out with you a symphony of life in action, 
and not infrequently a headache. 

To the male shopper the geography of the depart- 
ment store is a source of never-failing wonder. 
Technically, he is shopping under one roof. In 
practice, a man will walk farther to buy a razor and a 
game of dominoes at Gibson's than if he had bought 
the razor in Fulton Street and the dominoes near 
Brooklyn Bridge. The elevator system at Gibson's is 
complicated. As a rule it may be said that when 
you want to go down, the elevators all go up. 

But the distances are nothing to the problems of 



240 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

distribution. Commodities in the department store 
migrate under the influence of the seasons, the laws 
of political economy, social status, fashions, and 
biology. Shirts and electric stoves are in the base- 
ment in January and on the sixth floor in August. 
Children*s shoes at regular prices are on the ground 
floor, and at sale prices they are to be found in the 
basement; and Boy Scout shoes stand all by them- 
selves, like something in Greek grammar. If a man 
is buying gifts for a brood of three small nieces and 
one nephew — as will sometimes happen — he is lost. 
It is borne in upon him by patient floorwalkers that 
his little nephew is a boy, and will be found on the 
second floor. His youngest niece, he discovers, is 
an infant, and three aisles away. The second young- 
est girl is a child, so you take the elevator to the 
third floor and walk across. The eldest girl is a 
miss, and she is in the next elevator coming down. 
And if the mother of the family, and perhaps the 
cook, are also to be provided for, say at Christmas, 
you can see what would happen; for the cook in- 
jects a social factor which probably involves a visit 
to the sub-basement, and the mother of the four is 
as like as not to be found in a special sub-department 
which ministers to "stouts/* Just when an infant 
becomes a child, when a child becomes a miss, when 
a miss becomes a woman, and why a boy sometimes 



THE SHOPPERS 241 

leaps from infancy straight into the men's depart- 
ment, is something I should like the Professor of 
Anthropology at Colmnbia University to tell me. 



XI 



**And you can always exchange it," says the sales- 
woman to the woman shopper. 

The saleswoman who is worth her salt knows the 
precise moment when that suggestion must be made. 
It is the moment when the customer's doubts have 
apparently been resolved. She wants the new gown 
very much. It pleases her, soothes her, fits her. 
It is the moment when the male purchaser would nod 
and say, " I'll take it,'* and pull out his check-book. 
In that moment the woman shopper goes panicky 
at the thought, the sudden but inevitable thought, 
whether this new fabric will mean quite the same to 
her at home as it does now in the store. For, whereas 
man buys clothes to satisfy a physical need, woman 
shops largely for the satisfaction of her soul. A 
man's chest measure and sleeve length are the same 
at home and in the shop, and a three-button sacic 
cannot conceivably change to a two-button sack under 
any surroundings. But emotion is not to be tested 
by the yardstick. Woman, when she has picked and 
chosen, says to herself, " Yes, I like it now, under 



242 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

this light, in this room, set off against all the other 
shades and patterns, but how will it be at home ? " 
How will it be with her when she has the new gown 
to herself, away from this superheated atmosphere 
of acquisition, in the sudden drop of spirits that is 
sure to come? At home when she looks into the 
mirror and sees herself tired around the eyes, or 
when she first lifts the gown from the box in the 
cold light of the morning after, when her liberty of 
choice is gone, when that gown is hers to have and to 
hold, what then? 

In that moment of crisis the wise saleswoman 
says, quietly, "And you can always exchange it, of 
course." 

It is a problem of high moral importance, this sys- 
tem of purchase with a proviso. Its effect on the 
moral nature of woman is baneful. For recall only 
that human society, that all civilization, is based on 
the inviolability of contract. Organized life is pos- 
sible only on the assumption that a man surrenders 
what he agrees to give up, and keeps what he has 
promised to take. Under special circumstances he is 
allowed to change his mind, to break the contract, 
but almost invariably there is a penalty attached. 
And this penalty he pays as a matter of course, 
because he recognizes that to decide one way and to 



THE SHOPPERS 243 

want something else hampers the work of the world. 
It is anarchy. 

Too many women, however, enter the depart- 
ment store with the knowledge that they are doomed 
to buy something they will want to exchange. 
Woman begins shopping in the certainty, which is 
almost part of her fate, that her choice will be bad, 
but that it is of no consequence, since she can always 
send the things back. You see at once how utterly 
destructive this must be of all moral standards. It 
means living in a world of free choice where the 
sinner is not in the least handicapped against the 
saint. The woman who chooses wisely and once 
for all is no better off than the woman who keeps 
on exchanging things until she is satisfied. Con- 
sider, now, what it would mean to this world if men 
went at their day's work every morning saying, " I 
know I shall make a mess of it." Consider what it 
would mean if Tilden said to himself, " Of course 
I shall lose the first set, but then we can play it 
over till I win." Consider what it would mean if 
Dr. Mayo were to say, " I know this major opera- 
tion is going to be a failure, but we can always bring 
the patient to life again." 

I dwell on this point at some length because, so 
far as I am aware, no one before me has pointed out 
the vicious effect of the department store's unre- 



2M BELSHAZZAR COURT 

stricted exchange system upon woman's nature and on 
her place in society. What sincerity, what force 
can there be in woman's demand for an equal place 
in our man-made world as long as she continues to 
live so many hours a week in a world in which con- 
sequences do not follow upon acts, in which she may 
choose A and keep B? — a world in which mistakes 
are not paid for, in which you reach the second floor 
by taking the stairway to the cellar or the elevator 
to the second floor, it does not matter which ulti- 
mately? Imagine a world in which the wages of sin 
is not death, but a transfer slip which you present 
at a little window in the rear of the store. 

And you can see how the practice of unlimited and 
unpenalized exchange, if sufficiently continued, might 
stretch outside the realm of the department store 
and into life. If choice is always to be made with 
the idea that the first attempt will fail, and that 
there is always a second chance and a third, then how, 
when it comes to selecting a profession, a cause to 
work for, — a husband? The matter here becomes 
intricate and dangerous, and as a pioneer in the sub- 
ject I am not bound to exhaust it or even develop 
it through all its implications. As some one has 
said, whenever an idea is difficult or dangerous, or 
does not seem to justify your spending your own 
time upon it, throw it out as a suggestion for some 



THE SHOPPERS 245 

one else to work out. One might ask, for instance, 
whether there is any connection between the growth 
of the shopping habit and the divorce habit among 
the women of our unoccupied classes, both being 
based on a choice that is not final and a system of ex- 
change that is not penalized. But, as I have said,* 
the subject is complex, and I throw it out as a 
suggestion. 

In one sense, of course, it is not quite right to say 
that the habit carries no penalty with it. Specialists 
declare that the practice of sending things back adds 
something like ten per cent, to the normal price. 
So, after all, there is a penalty. But who pays it, 
my friends? Everybody; the shopper who does not 
exchange and the shopper who always sends things 
back, which is again a moral confusion. The wages 
of sin and the wages of virtue are exactly the same — 
ten per cent, on the normal price. 



Ill 



Sex antagonism in the department store — I should 
be making a sorry job of this study of a very im- 
portant phase of modern life if I omitted the sex 
factor, which, I am assured, colors all modern life 
from the quintessence of Nietzsche to the teething 
habits of the American infant, the eight-hour rail- 



246 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

road law, and the *' movies." You know, of course, 
what sex antagonism means. It is unceasing and re- 
morseless warfare waged on a front co-extensive with 
humanity. Man, the Central Power, is intrenched 
on the defensive. Allied woman batters away at 
the wall. War is waged by violence and by cunning. 
Sometimes the battle flares up in a storm of high 
explosives which flattens the trenches of masculine 
domination preparatory to a charge by Sylvia Pank- 
hurst. Sometimes it is the steady grinding process 
of field-artillery as woman conquers her privileges 
State by State. Sometimes it is the consolidation 
of new lines by Women in Industry, carried on behind 
a curtain fire of shrapnel. Sometimes it is the silent 
sapping and mining by which feminist ideas make 
their way into the male defenses and blow them up 
sky-high. Sometimes it is plain treachery, as when 
the old-fashioned, womanly woman stretches out her 
arms and says, " Kamerad ! Kamerad ! ** and the 
credulous male goes to meet his fate in the coils of 
the serpent of old Nile. In whatever form it mani- 
fests itself there is this eternal war between the 
sexes, the striving to dominate and not to be domi- 
nated, the conquests that are the undoing of the con- 
queror, the surrenders that are only temporary, the 
treaties of amity that are scraps of paper; in short, 
the sort of thing hinted at in Ecclesiastes and 



THE SHOPPERS 247 

Proverbs and amplified by Baudelaire, H. G. Wells, 
and Freud-Jung. 

But I was going to say that the kind of sex antag- 
onism you find in the department store is different 
from that which obtains in every other province of 
life. It is antagonism between members of the same 
sex. It is a civil war between the woman behind 
the counter and the woman in front. The purchase 
of four and a half yards of dress material is a pro- 
cess untinged by sentiment, a contest in which neither 
party asks or gives quarter. And the reason, of 
course, is that the two sides are too equally matched 
to permit anything but a grim attention to business. 
On either side of the counter are professional soldiers. 
I know, of course, that in the manuals of salesman- 
ship there is much talk about the money value of 
courtesy in salesmanship. But from personal obser- 
vation I am not prepared to say that such courtesy 
from a saleswoman to woman customers is the rule. 
There is, no doubt, a polite attention to duty, effi- 
ciency, patience. The arrogant blonde who offers 
her wares with an air of saying that socially she 
would prefer not to meet her customer is a disap- 
pearing type. But the politeness that is getting 
to be the rule is a formal, frigid politeness. The 
patience with which the seller will fetch the seven- 



248 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

teenth tailor-made for trying-on is mechanical. 
Rarely is there heart behind it. 

It is quite different when a man wanders into the 
department store. The rigid rules of warfare do 
not apply. A man in the rush hour at the counter 
will be waited on out of his turn without protest 
from the women shoppers. There may be a smile on 
either side of the counter, but in his helpless state he 
appeals to the innate chivalry in women. When a man 
shops for himself he is satisfied with the first approx- 
imation to what he wants. When he is shopping for 
his wife he does not even know what he wants. He 
reads something from a list and asks for six yards of 
it, and only wants assurance that he is getting what 
he asks for. His ignorance of the distinction between 
poplin and crepe de chine is a claim on the maternal 
instinct in the heart of the saleswoman. And he 
does not waste time. When a man buys half a dozen 
pairs of silk socks, he is shown a pair and assumes 
that the other five pairs out of the same box will be 
the same. A woman usually examines every pair 
of the half-dozen. A man in a department store is 
like Sir Galahad. He brings out what is best in 
everybody. Saleswomen are patient with him. 
Floorwalkers give him explicit directions to the shoe 
department. Elevator-boys call out the floors for 
him distinctly. The girl at the transfer desk guar- 



THE SHOPPERS 249 

antees delivery of the goods that same afternoon. 
The laws of war are not for him. He is not of the 
enemy. He belongs to the Red Cross. 

It is an interesting question whether there would 
not be a very definite economy of time and nerves 
if women could have their husbands do their shop- 
ping for them. It would be time saved even if we 
reckon the hours expended at home in persuading the 
man to undertake the task. I throw this out as a 
suggestion. 

As to the advisability of taking one*s husband to 
the shops, much may be said on both sides. On the 
one hand, it is certain that after he has spent three 
hours in a chair while his wife tries on Spring suits, 
a man will have a very definite idea of what women 
suffer in the daily task. The next time his wife 
comes home from the shops with a headache he is 
likely to be more sympathetic. But then again it 
may be that the memory of his own bitter ordeal 
will prevail, and he will carry away with him a 
more vivid sense of the futilities in which the life 
of woman is spent. It all depends on the man, of 
course. But the husband endowed with just a bit of 
philosophic reflection, planted three solid hours in a 
tapestry chair, in an audience of three hundred women 
and fifty salesgirls, will watch the strained and tired 
faces, the tryings-on and divestings, the search after 



250 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

the unattainable ideal, the final purchase made more 
out of weariness than out of satisfaction; and he can- 
not help asking himself, "For whom is it all?" 
And he will say to himself, " For us males ? " And 
it will make him thoughtful. On the whole, a uni- 
versity extension course in Shopping Practice and 
Observation would be good for the average man. The 
next time he speaks to a well-dressed woman at 
dinner he will know what it costs to make the world 
beautiful for him. He may thereupon decide to get 
on with less beauty or else he will be more ready to 
make allowances for women's nerves. But I am not 
sure. 

Taking along one*s husband to the store as critic 
and appraiser is of no use at all. In the first place, 
his principles of criticism are utterly unlike a 
woman's. His criticism is of the romantic, impres- 
sionistic school. He looks at his wife in the green 
cloak with fur edging and says, "I like that." Or 
else he says, " You look well in that." As if 
the mere fact that a woman looks well in a green 
coat, or that she likes it, were the deciding factor. 
Woman belongs, in the matter of dress, to the scien- 
tific school of criticism, which bases itself on universal 
principles — Aristotle, Taine, Brunetiere. It is criti- 
cism which does not ask whether a woman looks well 
in a green cloak trimmed with fox, but says. How 



THE SHOPPERS 251 

does this green cloak fit into that woman's life, her 
temperament, her likes, her friends, her duty to her 
family and to society, on the one hand ; and how near 
is it in danger of being duplicated by the woman next 
door, on the other hand? A man likes his wife's 
new dinner gown when it looks well on his wife in 
the shop. A woman is bound to think of the gown 
in relation to the wall-paper and the lights at home, 
the fact that she had a dark-red dinner gown year 
before last, the fact that her color is somewhat higher 
than it was two years ago, that she has taken on three 
pounds in weight, that her husband's income has 
Tnaterially increased since last year, and that next 
year people will be wearing greens and purples. 

But even the mere question whether a woman looks 
well in a new gown is one upon which her husband 
is not competent to speak except in the most super- 
ficial way. She is pretty in the new gown, or she 
is not; the infinite gradations escape him. The 
trouble, of course, is that he knows the woman in 
the gown too well. He cannot think of the dress 
but as an accessory to the woman. He can never see 
the gown as a thing-in-itself. This is a very subtle 
point, and naturally beyond the scope of the simple- 
minded race of husbands. But the distinction is 
there. When we say a woman is well-dressed, we 
do not mean that she looks well in a dress, but that 



252 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

she exhibits a dress in which she looks well. It is 
doubtful whether there are many women who would 
consent to be so beautiful as to make people una- 
ware of what they have on. It is a very delicate 
problem, this, of maintaining that perfect balance 
in which woman and dress do not drown each other. 
For a true appraisal, therefore, it needs the eye of 
a stranger to whom the two factors in the ensemble, 
woman and dress, are equally novel. Husbands 
should have recognized by this time that if it were 
a question of merely looking well, women would long 
ago have adopted the white uniform of the trained 
nurse, in which, demonstrably, more women look 
better than in any garment ever devised. 



It is only fair, after the emphasis I have laid on 
the deleterious effects of the shopping habit, to sug- 
gest that the evil is probably not in the practice itself, 
but in the excess. It is true that women return from 
the stores in a state of physical exhaustion and nerv- 
ous tangle, but it is also true that what they seek in 
the stores is something like spiritual refreshment. 
That unmistakable revival of the soul which comes 
from putting on a new gown, or a fresh suit of 
clothes — it is the same for women and men — is here 



THE SHOPPERS 253 

to be had in abundance. An hour spent with new 
things^ heaping counters of white stuffs, gay colors, 
rich textures, the glimmer of crystal and jewelry — 
it does not matter if it is imitation jewelry — and 
lights, and movement, must be very much like a cold 
shower for the spirit. There is the chance for an 
imaginative possession of all these rich, glowing, 
gleaming, solid, flimsy things. It is, after all, the 
excitement of the country fair — especially if you 
count in the music, the restaurant, the candy-counter, 
the marvelous patent clothes-wringer demonstrated 
in the basement, and all the other side-shows. It is 
the bazaar, without the odors of the East, perhaps; 
but these, I understand, can be easily dispensed with. 
And I dare say if the public should express a desire 
for the last touch of the bazaar, a turbaned Persian 
salesman in the Oriental rug department, a Chinese 
merchant with great horn spectacles in the porcelain 
department, the department store will supply them 
without loss of time. Perhaps they have done the 
trick already. 

But when all is said and done, when the balance 
has been most fairly adjusted, the influence of the 
department store on the position of women remains 
deplorable. Gibson*s is a handicap which women must 
cast off if they are ever to take an equal share in the 
work of the world. The tyranny of Dress — for shop- 



254 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

ping does mostly mean Dress — weighs more heavily 
on women than any of our man-made despotisms. 
The waste of energy, of time, of thought, upon clothes 
by one-half the race is terrifying. It is a burden 
from which very few women find it easy to escape. 
Dress is the gate of tribulation through which she 
must enter upon her business and her pleasures. The 
boy packs up and goes off to college. His sister must 
shop before she goes away to college, and through the 
year she must continue to shop. A man locks up his 
desk and goes away for a month's fishing in Canada. 
His wife must shop for a month's holiday in Canada. 
A man goes off to see Johnson play tennis. His wife 
must first shop for Johnson. A man calls up the box- 
oflSce and reserves two tickets for Fritz Kreisler. 
Woman begins by looking around to see whether she 
has anything to wear for Fritz Kreisler. And when 
a million women strike out for freedom by going 
out to earn their own living, it is too often only to 
enter upon a wider career of shopping. I understand 
that it takes a great deal of time to pick out those 
simple-looking, expensive materials. Woman's com- 
plaint against the Double Standard is justified. The 
double standard in clothes is largely responsible for 
her enslavement. 

What adds to the lure of the shopping habit is 



THE SHOPPERS 255 

that the vice is made so attractive. Shopping in 
the best stores is not commerce, but a social function. 
It is not only that Gibson's has music and pictures 
for your entertainment; writing-rooms, rest-rooms, 
playing rooms for the children, parcel-rooms, tele- 
phone booths, telegraph and cable stations, summer- 
resort bureaus. The very business of purchase and 
sale is conducted with a minimum of stress on the 
jelfish interests involved. When you enter Gibson's 
you are not expected to buy. If you buy, you do 
not carry parcels home, of course — that goes without 
saying; you have them sent. And if the prelim- 
inary labor of picking out things to be sent is too 
much of a strain, you have them sent on approval. 
When you have made your choice, the obligation to 
stick to your choice, as I pointed out before, is absent. 
Finally, the institution that goes by the name of the 
charge account has done away with the sordid handling 
of money. I cannot imagine how further removed 
one can be from primitive barter and sale than under 
this system where no one asks you to buy, no one 
asks you to choose, no one asks you to carry, no one 
asks you to pay. It is a delightful relationship of 
host and visitor. The great spaces are the host's 
reception-room. The treasures he has gathered from 
every corner of the earth are his private collections 
for your entertainment. The music and the reading- 



256 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

rooms and the rest-salons are the setting for a delight- 
ful week-end. It is, as I have said. Society. *' Mr. 
J. Walter Gibson requests the pleasure of your com- 
pany at half after nine every day in the week at 999 
Fifth Avenue. There will be music by artists from 
the Metropolitan, a conversazione on Picasso, and an 
exhibition of Japanese pongee shirt-waists, reduced 
to $4.89." 

Luxurious shopping, there's the enemy. It takes 
a normal and necessary economic function and makes 
it into a dissipation. Everything has been made 
pleasant; everything has been made easy. Take this 
question of " honest advertising,*' and the special sale 
about which people are so much concerned. It is 
argued that if you advertise something for $11.67 
reduced from $18, and the article is well worth 
$11.67, it is nevertheless fraud if the original price 
was anything less than $18. From the standpoint 
of pure ethics, this is so, I suppose. Nevertheless 
there is a difference between the misrepresentation 
which would sell a second-hand garment for a new one 
or cotton for wool and the misrepresentation which 
gives you honest quality and your money's worth 
and only exaggerates the bargain. A barrel of apples 
with three layers of good fruit on a foundation of 
windfalls is fraud. A barrel of apples, sound to 
the bottom, selling for three dollars, worth three 



THE SHOPPERS 257 

dollars, but advertised as formerly selling for five 
dollars, is disingenuous, perhaps, but, after all, why 
shouldn't a housewife know the normal price for a 
barrel of apples? She should not be compelled to 
dig into the barrel for bad apples, but she ought to 
know the world she lives in. It is best for the shop- 
ping women that she shall not altogether be safe- 
guarded and sheltered. For her own sake she must 
not be surrounded with too many automatic safety 
devices. If she is not to have the worry of lugging 
parcels home as her grandmother did, if she is to 
have the privilege of changing her mind, if she is 
to be spared the trouble of handling money but leaves 
that to be managed by her husband at the end of the 
month with a check-book, let her at least exercise the 
amount of intelligence and effort necessary to dis- 
tinguish between something which is intrinsically 
worth $11.67 and something which is worth $18. If 
even that effort is spared her, she is utterly removed 
from the realm of responsible action. For her own 
moral welfare, shopping must retain something of its 
respectable function as an economic process and not 
degenerate utterly into a five-o'clock tea. 



XII 

ACADEMIC HEIGHTS 



In New York there is, of course, a Latin Quarter. 
It lies, by the shortest reckoning, some six miles 
from where most people would place it. Nine citi- 
zens out of ten, if you said Latin Quarter to them, 
would stare a moment and remark, " Oh, yes, Green- 
wich Village,'* and recommend the Sixth Avenue 
** L." Now, the Sixth Avenue " L " is right enough, 
but instead of getting off at Bleecker Street or Eighth 
Street, you continue north for twenty-two minutes 
by schedule. For what your informant has in mind 
is Bohemia — the garret studios where youth and 
the dream of art make light of starvation and the 
charcoal-man, the Quatz Arts ball, the cafes, the 
dance-halls. Our New York equivalent for that is 
undoubtedly Greenwich Village with its studios — 
though the garrets are missing — its social and artistic 
heresies, and the flavor of foreign eating-houses. 
But that is not the Latin Quarter. 
258 




Steps that Rise in a Succession of Granite Waves Lead 

TO THE library 



ACADEMIC HEIGHTS 259 

Learned men before me have pointed out for Paris 
that the place consecrated to art, young love, and 
velveteens is to-day not the Quartier Latin at all, but 
Montmartre, several miles across the river. The dis- 
trict on the left bank of the Seine is to-day, predom- 
inantly, what it has been for six hundred years, a 
vicinage in which there are a great many people who 
could actually speak Latin if they chose to. It is 
the bailiwick of the highbrows, the dons, the learned 
faculties in silk gowns, the forty-two-centimeter 
savants of the Institut, the Sorbonne, the University 
of France. There is probably less actual canvas- 
splashing done in the Latin Quarter to-day than in 
any other section of Paris, and more lofty thinking 
to the square foot than anywhere else on earth. It 
contains fewer grisettes than bespectacled students 
from Russia, the Balkans, the two Americas. Where 
the Mimis are popularly supposed to be sighing for 
their Rodolphes, on the Left Bank, M. Bergson ex- 
pounds the mysteries of the vital urge to serious- 
minded young women and duchesses. It is the region 
where the French Academy in two hundred and fifty 
years of devoted labor has carried the Dictionary of 
the French language through the letter F. An 
ancient name for the vicinity is L'Universite. That 
supplies the necessary hint and our own New York 
parallel. 



260 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

Our own Latin Quarter is not around Washington 
Square, but on Morningside Heights. Its dominating 
influence is not Gauguin and Dreiser^ but Dr. Nich- 
olas Murray Butler. In a district of not much more 
than one-fifth of a square mile you find all the re- 
quisites of a Latin Quarter in the precise historical 
sense I have set down. It is an area of which fully 
two-thirds are given up to public buildings — educa- 
tional, religious, and eleemosynary. It has all the 
necessary furnishings to make not merely a satisfac- 
tory parallel with Paris, but an astonishingly com- 
plete parallel. It has a great university. It has the 
seminaries of two theological creeds, of which one is 
the richest and largest plant of its kind in the country. 
It has the country's greatest cathedral, which will also 
be the country's most beautiful cathedral if the ar- 
chitects ever decide what it will look like. It has a 
great hospital, St. Luke's, which for many years to 
come, seems destined to overtop the cathedral across 
the street. For the Pantheon, near the Seine, it has 
our greatest commemorative monument after the 
Washington obelisk on the Potomac — the Tomb on 
Riverside Drive. For the gardens of the Luxem^ 
bourg it has two park belts which are also its bound- 
aries, Morningside on the east and Riverside on the 
west, so that on Academic Heights a heavy stream of 
erudition, piety, and charity flows between solid banks 



ACADEMIC HEIGHTS 261 

of verdure. For a match to the Seine it has the 
Hudson. 

It is more than a match. When you think of 
what the Europeans have done with their tuppenny 
rivers and then look at the Hudson, across to the Pali- 
sades, south to the harbor, north to where the sudden 
break in the bastions of the western bank reveals a 
prospect of infinity, you have not the least doubt as 
to where the Seine, the Thames, and the Rhine will 
be when we have piled up two thousand years of 
historical association, of romance, and of reverie, 
like that in which the transatlantians have swathed 
their picayune streams. You might take the Seine, 
the Thames, and the Rhine and place them side by 
side in the Hudson and have enough room left for 
an All-American Henley. But because we have not 
yet at hand a Wordsworth or a Heine, our unrivaled 
waterways must see their inmiense raw resources of 
beauty and romance monopolized by the prose poets 
of the Albany Day Line. 

You can imagine what the Europeans would do 
with the Hudson if they had it — ^the Dickenses, the 
Hugos, who have wound and curled the murky streams 
of Thames and Seine through the life of their capi- 
tals, making the river a force, an agent, a mirror, a 
commentator upon the life on its banks. The rivers 
of Europe are the Greek choruses to the drama of 



262 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

the cities — London Bridge and Pont Neuf. Hardly 
a hero of Parisian fiction crosses the Pont Neuf with- 
out making it his confidant. Yet what is the tiny 
current of the Seine to the mighty sweep of the Hud- 
son? What are the lights on the bridges of Paris to 
the thousand lights of mystery that swing along the 
base of the Palisades north and south — lights of 
heavy, squat barges lost in the shadows; lights on 
trim, white yachts reflected in the sheen of their 
enamel; and the sudden upflare of huge spouts of 
flame from the furnaces and gas-houses on the western 
bank? It is only a question of finding our Dickens, 
Wordsworth, or Hugo, before the electric blaze of 
the great real-estate advertising frames on top of the 
Palisades is coined into legend and story. 



II 



Our Latin Quarter is something more than half a 
mile in length, from 110th Street, where the Synod 
Hall and Bishop's residence of St. John's show that 
the Gothic may be brand-new and yet beautiful, to 
121st Street, which constitutes the northern boundary 
of Columbia University. Five hundred feet to the 
north the Hebrew Theological Seminary is the last 
educational outpost, while in the extreme western 
corner we must prolong the frontier to 123d Street, 



ACADEMIC HEIGHTS 263 

so as to include Grant's Tomb. Just below the 
southern border are the work-rooms of the National 
Academy of Design. From Morningside Park on the 
east to the river is a matter of less than a third of a 
mile. From all four sides the ground rises, gently 
from the south and west, more sharply from the 
north, almost perpendicularly from the east, to the 
crest of the plateau of which the exact median point 
is occupied by Alma Mater on the steps of the Low 
Library. Thus from three sides the University may 
be reached with a modicum of leg-work, though from 
the east it is a stiff climb. 

Morningside Park is probably the most perpendicu- 
lar public garden in New York, and perhaps any- 
where; I am unacquainted with the landscape-gar- 
den system of Tibet. For the freshman the one 
hundred and some score steps of Morningside are 
an excellent test for the wind. The faculty takes 
them as a form of exercise, and plods up with a good 
deal of effort, to stop for breath at the foot of Karl 
Bitter's statue of Carl Schurz in a bronze hemicycle 
which is part of the retaining wall for the park. If 
one is honest he will admit that he stops for breath 
at the feet of Carl Schurz, but you can make out 
an excellent case if you pretend that it's the view. 

The top of Morningside is the one place where 
you may see across the entire breath of Manhattan 



264. BELSHAZZAR COURT 

Island^ and only at two points on this acropolis. 
One is precisely at the foot of Carl Schurz's statue, 
the other is a fifth of a mile farther north on this 
same upper edge of the park wall at 120th Street. 
From these two vantage-points there is a clear view, 
west to the Palisades, and east to the Long Island 
Sound. At the foot of the hill lies the city — Harlem 
and the towers of the rich on Fifth Avenue across 
the trees of Central Park. Here again I cannot 
help thinking of the countless heroes of French fic- 
tion from Balzac through Zola to the most contem- 
porary of moderns who have looked down from Mont- 
martre upon the lights of Paris and yearned or cried 
defiance. Possibly there are upper classmen at 
Columbia who look down from Morningside on the 
city of six millions and dream of conquest. I 
can even imagine a sophomore, after an unfortunate 
mid-year exam., poised in reverie over the balus- 
trade. As I have said, we need only the genius and 
inspiration. The city is there. 

The region has its background of history, though 
the chronicle does not reach so far back as in the 
Latin Quarter on the Seine, where they show you the 
ruins of Roman baths under the Museum of Cluny, and 
streets which are supposed to be very much as Dante 
found them when he followed lectures in Theology 3 
at the university. Morningside is Revolutionary 



ACADEMIC HEIGHTS 265 

ground. General Washington retreated by the 
Bloomingdale Road to Harlem Heights and beyond, 
and the British camped on the site of the University. 
The armies lay on either side of the valley which 
Fort Lee commuters now call Manhattan Street and 
took pot-shots at each other. Then General Wash- 
ington attempted a surprise, sent his troops across the 
valley, and struck the enemy on both flanks. The 
battle of Harlem Heights was a success, but not 
enough of a success. General Washington gave up 
his comfortable apartments in the Jumel Mansion to 
resume his historical task of dotting the countryside 
with Washington Headquarters, and the American 
army made its way across the North River for Trenton 
and points west. Block-houses still mark the stra- 
tegic points in this region, one at the northern edge of 
Central Park, another at the northern edge of Mom- 
ingside Park at 123d Street. A bronze tablet in the 
wall of one of the University buildings at 117th Street 
commemorates the battle of Harlem Heights. 

The manor-houses of the colonial era gave way to 
farms and market-gardens. Then came the squatters, 
with their shacks perched on comparatively slight 
but inaccessible heights. To the student of compara- 
tive zoology, Morningside Heights is of interest as 
the last habitat on Manhattan Island of the domestic 
goat. They were there when Columbia moved to the 



266 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

Heights from 49th Street in 1897, and for a number 
of years, though in dwindling numbers, they con- 
tinued to maintain themselves amid the encroaching 
waves of a new Kultur. Only a year or two ago there 
was on exhibition in the window of a drug-store 
fronting the Campus the stuffed effigj of what pur- 
ported to be the last survivor of this interesting race, 
Hircus hibernicus Academicus. In that drug-store 
to-day students eat their nut sundaes at the soda- 
counter, and so the immemorial past and the present, 
even as on the banks of the Seine, rub elbows. 

Unquestionably, the route by which the distin- 
guished visitor should be made to approach Morning- 
side Heights is from the east, by one of the cross- 
streets that run from the Park into the thickets of 
the Harlem ghetto. If you come up by Riverside 
Drive, the magnificent road and the river may not 
leave sufficient enthusiasm for the gradual unveiling 
of the charms of the Heights proper. Only by emerg- 
ing from the huddle of dingy apartment-houses east 
of Eighth Avenue will the visitor catch full tilt the 
complete beauty of the scene — the half-mile sweep of 
the wooded amphitheater, and, crowning it, above the 
poplars, the choir of the cathedral that is yet to be, 
with its cluster of chapels, jeweled stonework which 
comes fresh from the mason's hands, and in a year 
takes on the soft texture of age. 



ACADEMIC HEIGHTS 267 

St. John's grows slowly — not, perhaps, by the 
standard of the medieval cathedrals, but very slowly 
by comparison with railway terminals and aqueducts. 
It has been twenty-five years in the building, and for 
half of that time the sole visible result was an enor- 
mous arch of granite, now hidden within the choir, 
but then standing bare to the sky. When the last 
touch to the last tower of the finished cathedral is 
given, I doubt if the effect of the massed structure 
on the observer then living can compare with the 
huge, gaunt span which so many of us can recall, 
a giant proscenium behind which the sun went down 
into the river in what must always remain the great- 
est show on earth. There was a tradition among us 
of the first years of the University on the hill, who 
found the great arch watching over the city every 
morning, and left it on guard at night, that St. Jolin's 
grew so slowly because it was being built on a cash 
basis. We had it that every Sunday, at services in 
the cathedral vaults, the plate was passed round, and 
when the trustees had counted the proceeds they 
would authorize a slab or two for the arch, a bit of 
buttress work, or perhaps only order a couple of 
barrels of lime. We used to jest about it. Matter- 
of-fact persons observed that the arch grew so delib- 
erately because the builders waited for the mortar 
to settle. Irreverent sophomores suggested that the 



268 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

builders might be waiting for the trustees to settle. 
And yet^ for all our flippancy about the arch, it 
entered into our sophomore souls as deeply as any- 
thing could be expected to go into that shallow 
medium. We were the legitimate successors of the 
pious and irreverent Middle Ages. 

To-day it very often occurs to me that St. John's, 
in its slow rise, should be real and visible comfort to 
a great many people who read newspaper and maga- 
zine articles about the swirling tides of change and 
What is Wrong with the Church. If the editorial 
writers and the special contributors are right — and it 
cannot be that they are not — the world as we know 
it to-day is crumbling to bits. The knell has sounded 
for institutionalism. The churches are already empty ; 
soon they will be in ruins. How, then, in view of 
the imminent dissolution of Christianity and its re- 
placement by social welfare, in view of the disappear- 
ance of the churches and their replacement by the 
moving-picture theaters, can sober, successful men 
of business like the trustees of St. John's be engaged 
in so speculative a business as putting up a cathedral 
that may take fifty years to finish? Can it be that, 
after all, when the cathedral is finished, the market 
for it will not be dead? 

That, apparently, is the presumption upon which 
the trustees are acting; and, being successful men 



ACADEMIC HEIGHTS 269 

of business, perhaps there is something, after all, in 
what they believe. Perhaps this recognizable world, 
with its institutionalism, is not crumbling as fast as 
the newspapers say, or possibly the very business of 
building a cathedral helps to stay the process of de- 
cay. At any rate, here is the fact for timid conserva- 
tives to take comfort in, that Messrs. Morgan and 
Belmont are building St. John's with apparently as 
much confidence in the future as though they were 
building a subway or an extension to the Catskill 
Aqueduct. In London has just been finished a great 
Catholic cathedral, and in Paris work is still progres- 
sing upon Sacre Coeur on the top of Montmartre. 
It is all very complex and beyond the scope of a 
mere impressionist. 



Ill 



A noble Roman basilica and twelve massive factory 
buildings of brick, built like all model industrial 
structures for light and air, make up Columbia Uni- 
versity proper as distinguished from its affiliated in- 
stitutions. Teachers College, across the way on 120th 
Street, and Barnard College for Women, on the other 
side of Broadway. No modern college president 
would object to having his establishment referred to 
as an educational plant, and that is the one impres- 



270 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

sion of Columbia campus which deepens with time — 
a great group of utilitarian work-shops devoted to 
the generation of power and light as the president's 
commencement address might describe it. 

This, however, is not the first impression which the 
visitor will carry away if he enters the campus from 
the main approach on 116th Street up the far-flung 
flight of steps that rise in a succession of granite 
waves, checked with red-brick tapestry, to the Low 
Library. More than the classic lines of the Library, 
with its colonnade and dome, this stairway of magnifi- 
cent proportions justifies the adjective Roman which 
it has so often received. The dome, the colonnade, 
the monumental granite terrace are the things that 
hit you first and hit you hard; and the visitor who 
has climbed the stairs and strolled over the brick 
plaza which is the campus and made a hasty tour of 
the subsidiary buildings will remember chiefly the 
Library. 

As first impressions go, that is right enough. It 
is a pity only that so few out-of-town visitors are 
granted the opportunity to see the Library at its 
best ; and that is at night when the great lamps glow 
out between the columns and give just enough light 
to splash the noble facade with gleams of white and 
pale yellows and shadow. The effect then is as far 
away as you can imagine from modernism and in- 



ACADEMIC HEIGHTS 271 

dustrial efficiency. South Court and the Library at 
night are like the weird marble dreams of Arnold 
Boecklin in his haunted isles. Night and Mr. Edison 
in combination have outfitted New York with a fori- 
of beauty that no other city can show; the Singer 
Tower, Broadway during the theater hours, and the 
Library on University Heights are the three local 
triumphs of their collaboration. 

But when one comes back to the campus again and 
again after spending four years upon its brick pave- 
ments, crosses it hurriedly on the way from home to 
the subway station in the morning, or more leisurely 
in the late afternoon home from the subway, and 
again at night to and from the theater, the Library, 
as the embodiment of the spirit of the University, 
shrinks into the background, and it is the great rec- 
tangles of reddish-brown brick that impose themselves 
as the real university; they are so obviously useful, 
so plainly capable of containing the thousands of 
students who are listed in the catalogue, so clearly 
intent on business. Once the architects had given the 
Library the place of honor in the center of the cam- 
pus, with a splendid wastefulness of space, the real 
workshops were distributed with the most rigorous 
deference to economy and order. Symmetry runs 
riot. Two halls on the east front of the campus 
facing Amsterdam Avenue balance two halls on the 



272 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

west front facing Broadway. Schermerhorn Hall^ in 
the northeast corner, balances Havemeyer Hall in the 
northwest corner. The Romanesque Chapel on the 
east of the Library balances in general design and 
dimensions Earl Hall on the west flank. It is almost 
like a perfect joint operation by Foch and Haig. 

From the summit of South Court, at the entrance 
to the Library, the brick plaza, which is the campus 
proper, runs north for a distance of two city blocks 
and makes a sheer drop of some thirty feet to the 
Grove. The University begins on the south like the 
Roman Forum, and ends on the north like Oxford. 
The old trees in the Grove have been spared. The 
gardeners have done their work with the lawns. Here, 
indeed, you might imagine philosophers strolling 
about under the trees in high discourse. Only the 
Grove to-day is not given up to philosophers. The 
PhiD/s do not stroll, meditating their theses. It 
would be rather hard to meditate in the open air on 
the Myxosporida Found in the Gall Bladders of 
Fishes from the Eastern Coast of Canada. The 
undergraduate uses the Grove only as a short cut 
from the " Gym ** to the subway or his boarding- 
house. By reading the president's commencement 
address and the University Quarterly you will un- 
doubtedly find the various points at which Columbia 
touches life. But neither the president nor the 



ACADEMIC HEIGHTS 273 

Quarterly mentions the Grove as the point at which 
the University comes into closest contact with the 
outside world. 

For in the Grove there are trees and grass, and 
where there are trees there are sure to be squirrels, 
and where there are squirrels and grass there are 
nurses with baby-carriages and little ones toddling 
after the squirrels or putting their dolls to bed just 
outside the windows of the Zoological Museum. The 
real Peripatetics on Morningside range from two 
years to five. Whatever may be thought of the presi- 
dent's attitude toward his faculty, his policy to the 
baby-carts in the Grove is most liberal. There may 
be some rule restricting the privileges of the Grove 
to the offspring of faculty members, or, at least, to 
children whose parents can show a college degree. 
But if there is such a rule, I don't imagine it is 
rigorously enforced. As a result, the university 
squirrels are uncommonly fat and lazy, fastidious in 
their food, and tame to the point where they scurry 
through the massive iron palings which inclose the 
Grove, across the asphalt of 120th Street, to perch 
on the very steps of Teachers College. 

The squirrels and babies are on equal terms of 
intimacy with the great bronze Pan who lolls at his 
ease of twelve feet or more over a water-basin in the 
corner of the Grove, his back turned disdainfully 



274 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

on the Amsterdam Avenue cars. From his easy posi- 
tion at the edge of the fountain^ Pan has observed 
the academic processions filing into the gymnasium, 
which is also the university assembly hall, has over- 
heard the sonorous presidential formula conferring 
honorary degrees on several hundred distinguished 
citizens, and has apparently remained content with- 
out a degree or a diploma ; at least. Pan's smile would 
indicate that. He was never one for select company. 
In the absence of fauns and dryads, the children, the 
squirrels, and the nurse-girls are good enough for 
him. 

The campus atmosphere is largely feminine. Why? 
It cannot be that the young men are all grinding away 
at their books in their rooms or in the Library, while 
the women go in for sunshine and leisure. The bal- 
ance of scholarship and application is the other way. 
The reason is, I suppose, that the young women from 
Barnard and Teachers College are compelled to do 
a great deal of walking because of scattered class- 
rooms. With the men this is not so. During the 
early days of Columbia on the Heights the work- 
shops were half as many as they are now, and of 
libraries there was only one. The men in the College, 
the Mines men, the lawyers, took their lectures in 
half a dozen buildings, perhaps, and the campus be- 
tween hours was as lively a place as the Broad Street 



ACADEMIC HEIGHTS 275 

curb. But Columbia has grown, and, like some of the 
lower biological forms, has propagated by splitting 
up. The campus proper has spilled over across 116th 
Street to South Field, where Hamilton Hall, the 
college proper, with its own library, lying close to 
the long rows of tall, brick dormitories, has drained 
off virtually the entire undergraduate body. Only the 
Gym in the Grove, and Earl Hall with its forums and 
cenacles, form a connecting link between the under- 
graduates and the old campus. Among the post- 
graduate schools there has been the same process of 
decentralization. The lawyers who for many years 
were cooped up in spare rooms in the Low Library 
now have the generous spaces of Kent Hall to them- 
selves. The architects have their own library. There 
is Earl Hall for student activities. There is the 
Chapel. 

Conditions are different now from what they were 
fifteen years ago, when chapel attendance was not 
quite a monster mass-meeting. Services were then 
held in the amphitheater of Schermerhom Hall. In 
the main lobby of Schermerhorn, the skeleton of a 
mastodon faced the visitor as he entered. I believe 
it still does. One day the rumor spread that the 
mastodon had been knocked over that morning in the 
mad rush to chapel. The story proved to be untrue. 
A dozen was a fair morning's attendance. The last 



276 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

time I visited the old amphitheater was seven or 
eight years ago^ when M. Bergson lectured on Crea- 
tive Evolution — or was it the Phenomena of Laugh- 
ter? (my French is not perfect) — to crowded benches. 
His audience easily represented a full month's chapel 
attendance. I understand that things are different 
to-day, and this shows once more^ as in the case of 
St. John's, that the decay of the religious spirit has 
not been as rapid as some people think. 

Additional evidence on this point is supplied by 
the great new Seminary on Broadway, diagonally 
across from the University, stretching a solid front 
of four hundred feet of lovely Gothic detail, which, in 
the mass, however, I find rather disappointing. Wlien 
the eye has followed that fa9ade for a city block, 
it has had enough. The masonry ceases to flow and 
begins to sprawl. Imagine a stretch of pointed arches, 
windows, embrasures, moldings, and carven lace-work 
which it would take Ted Meredith fifteen seconds to 
pass at top speed. But the detail is exquisite. Your 
modern architect apparently need not wait for time 
to give the sanctifying touch to his stone and masonry* 
Give him money enough, and he will find the right 
kind of stone to take on not only the form but the 
patina of the old monuments. 

A noble archway does help to break the monotony 
of the enormous front. It leads into a great quad- 



ACADEMIC HEIGHTS 277 

rangle, with lawns and walks and a religious quiet 
which not even the bold terra-cotta glare of the ten- 
story apartment-houses, with three baths, on Clare- 
mont Avenue, can destroy. Long cloisters stretch on 
two sides of the quadrangle, and here again the 
freshness of the brass-work, the gleam of new varnish, 
is not altogether destructive of the religious spirit, 
though I am aware that on several occasions the ques- 
tion has been raised whether there is such a spirit 
at the Union Theological Seminary to destroy. This 
is not a controversial article, but I maintain that in 
a house so beautiful there must be a worthy soul 
indwelling. For that matter, on Sunday people un- 
questionably do pass through the gateway, cross the 
quadrangle, and enter the Seminary Chapel, in size 
a metropolitan church, which forms the southwest 
corner of the great inclosure. The organ peals out 
nobly, there is the sound of hymns, and outside on 
the walks and in the cloisters the young of Morning- 
side Heights walk about in Sunday habiliments and 
with their parents, the same young who on secular 
days disport themselves with the squirrels on the 
University campus, now subdued by Sunday clothes 
to an appropriate demeanor; subdued, but not 
excessively. 

With the Seminary, as with the University build- 
ings, you get the impression of vast uninhabited 



278 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

spaces. There are close neighbors of the Seminary 
who can hardly recall seeing any one entering the 
great building or coming out whom you would mark 
for a theological student. 



IT 



If one looks for an immediately visible influence 
of the University ;, the Cathedral, and the Seminaries 
upon the outward aspect of the Heights, he is likely 
to be disappointed. The apartment-houses on Broad- 
way and Morningside Drive are almost as ornate as 
they are farther down-town or up-town; the predilec- 
tion for classical names, in the style of Pullman, 
is just as emphatic. If you look for mass effects, 
there is little about the aspect of the neighborhood 
once you turn your back on the campus, to show that 
you are in a peculiar cultural atmosphere. But if 
you are on the watch for subtler things, they are 
there. Inside of the ornate apartment-houses an 
observant eye begins to detect differences. The click 
of typewriters is a normal sound in Morningside in- 
teriors. There is a high average of young faces in 
the lobbies, the student overflow from the University 
dormitories. And if you are curious and mannerless 
enough to peep at the addresses on the envelopes 
which elevator-boys have a habit of posting on the 



ACADEMIC HEIGHTS 279 

walls of the elevator cage, you will see stamped 
envelopes from book-publishing firms, from magazine 
subscription offices, from teacher's agencies, travel 
bureaus, symphony orchestras, independent little 
theaters — all testifying clearly to the presence of a 
select cultural population. 

The signs are more emphatic in the shop windows. 
The haberdashery exposed is of an aggressive pattern 
and shade that testify plainly to the presence of a 
large undergraduate population. The little specialty 
shops for women indicate in the same way the pres- 
ence of a large female population which is too busy 
to shop down-town. The eating-places swarm on 
every side, one more proof of a large bachelor 
environment. The eating-shops are small, but they 
strive for and attain artistic effects — cozy corners, 
soft lights, quaint furnishings, an actual spinning- 
wheel in the window, all of which indicates something 
better than the tastes that are satisfied at Childs*s. 
On the news-stands the piles of ten-cent magazines 
are not taller than the thirty-five-cent magazines, and 
the Evening Post makes quite a respectable showing 
against the Evening Journal. The nature of the pic- 
ture post-cards on sale in the drug-stores is an in- 
fallible index. They do not go in for the robust 
comedy of sitting on freshly painted park benches. 
They are truly informative pictures — ^the University 



280 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

buildings, of course; Riverside, Grant's Tomb — in 
short, the kind one sends home from Paris instead 
of from Long Beach. 

The popular picture-card on Morningside Heights 
is indicative of the ethnology of the place. With the 
exception of certain streets in Greenwich Village, no 
other section of New York shows so large a per- 
centage of the old American race — to say Anglo- 
Saxon would be inviting needless controversy. The 
University has drawn thousands of students from 
all parts of the country, and it is to the South, the 
West, the Southwest that the picture-cards of Grant's 
Tomb and St. John's go out in large numbers. The 
physical traits of the older racial type are more 
pronounced in the women than in the men — ^tall, 
spare, graceful women with high-strung, almost pain- 
fully clear-cut features, and the prematurely gray 
hair which is the sign of the upper-class American 
woman who is not of the idle classes. Especially in 
July, when the summer vacation brings thousands of 
school-teachers from the great hinterland, Morning- 
side is strongly marked with profiles and accents that 
are decidedly not of the average New York. 




.^ 



Fishing Shacks at Fulton Market 



XIII 
THE CITY'S RAGGED EDGES 



When the suburban real-estate man gets do-vvn on 
his prayer-rug in the morning, he turns to Herald 
Square. He turns to it in his daily prayers in the 
advertising columns, and he measures time and dis- 
tance from it. They are not long, painful miles 
such as the foot-sore pilgrim counts to Mecca, but 
trifling quarters of an hour, half-hours, forty-five 
minutes at most, by express-trains that are always 
on time, that are never missed by the most dilatory 
of commuters, that always stop at stations a stone's- 
throw from the remotest home site on the real-estate 
man's particular " development." 

It is puzzling. What, at first sight, can be the 
appeal of Herald Square to the ordinary possible 
purchaser of a semi-detached, two-family brick, 20 by 
100, on terms less than paying rent.'' If the real- 
estate man said thirty-five minutes from City Hall, 
you can see how that would appeal to the army of 
281 



282 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

clerks in the down-town offices. If he said thirty-five 
minutes from Madison Square, it would be an argu- 
ment addressed to the army of workers in the lofts 
and factories of the lower Fifth Avenue region. If he 
said thirty-five minutes from Chambers Street, the 
call would be to the marketmen, the clerks, the small 
traders of the lower West Side. But what special 
lure is there in Herald Square for the humble folk 
who balance their small city rents against the joys 
and responsibilities of ownership in a two-family 
brick, 20 by 100? 

The appeal, of course, is directed to the lust for 
social ease and power which is supposed to animate 
the great American buying public. Consider the 
ready-made suit at $18 to $25. The clothing manu- 
facturer invariably visualizes his prospective custom- 
ers amidst surroundings of extreme luxury. People 
always wear the $18 suit at Palm Beach, at Meadow 
Brook, at the Ritz, at the clubs. They dally with 
golf-sticks and tennis-racquets. They gaze out over 
the Sierras from the tonneaus of splendid machines. 
They navigate rakish motor-boats over cool waves. 
None of these accessories is actually furnished with 
the $18 garment, but always there is the implication 
that the act of putting on one of these suits endows 
the wearer with the ease, the spacious sense of power, 
which is the portion of the idlers of the world. 



THE CITY'S RAGGED EDGES 283 

So it is with Herald Square, the lower terminus 
of the Great White Way, the entrance-gate to the 
realm of frivolity and the land of ready spending. 
To be only a certain distance from Herald Square is 
an assurance to the purchaser of a two-family, semi- 
detached brick on easier terms than rent, that in 
moving out of town he need not give up the Opera, 
or the Broadway restaurants, that he may in the 
course of a few years pay off the second mortgage on 
his home without divorcing himself from the Lambs, 
the Friars, or his reserved table on Election night 
and New Year's Eve. There is thus a true as well 
as a subtle psychology in these real-estate advertise- 
ments timed from Herald Square. They actually do 
convey the sense of a large command of life at the 
end of a thirty-five-minute ride. It does not matter 
that the plain apartment-dweller in the city never 
thinks of these pleasures as within his reach or desires. 
They become very real, attainable, as soon as he 
imagines himself in the suburbs. They are almost a 
part of the bargain, thrown in with the liberal in- 
stalment plan and the free title insurance. 



II 



A metropolis grows up in two ways. At first it 
expands legitimately, adding furlong to furlong of 



284 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

growth. Then it leaps forward and seizes a large 
area overnight by act of Legislature or Parliament, 
sweeping into its net a score of villages and settle- 
ments. Then it proceeds to fill up the inter- 
vening spaces. In European cities they have an inner 
ring, which is the old city, and an outer ring, which 
may be anything. New York, Chicago, Boston, Seat- 
tle, have their inner rings which are the legitimate 
city, and the outer ring which came by the get-big- 
quick method. New York succumbed to the pro- 
moter's fever in 1898. In that year the city absorbed 
large areas of virgin soil and a chain of independent 
villages, some of them nearly as old as Manhattan 
itself. From the Sound to the Atlantic they stretch 
across the backbone of Long Island and the lower 
harbor to Staten Island, where the local tradition, 
in spite of municipal ferries and promised timnels, 
has remained at its strongest. 

Such frenzied expansion is the reason why the 
traveler in the nearer suburbs of a great city will 
often come across a " city line '* which is no longer 
the city line. As you near the old city line from the 
heart of population the solid blocks of apartments 
and flats thin out. There follow stretches of waste 
land, market-gardens, cemeteries. It is across this 
zone between the old and the new city lines that the 
transit railways throw their surface lines and elevated 



THE CITY'S RAGGED EDGES 285 

" extensions/' and close behind them are the builders, 
crisscrossing the raw acres with their long lines of 
" frame '* and brick. 

These are the raw edges I have in mind — the large 
spaces within the periphery of the city, toward which 
the population is being rolled out in thinning layers 
like a lump of dough under the rolling-pin of the 
housewife. The rolling-pin does not operate with 
precision. The raw material does not spread out to 
a uniform thinness of small dwellings with garden 
space. Here and there it cakes and congeals into 
centers of congestion. Little Ghettoes, Little Italys 
spring up in the bare spaces. These are the " Har- 
lem conditions ** so close to the heart of the real-estate 
promoter. His ambition is to skip the intermediate 
state of development from raw acreage through the 
small home to over-crowding, and to create congestion 
on the virgin soil from the start. The profits, of 
course, are larger than from home development 
proper, and though the real-estate promoter, as we 
shall see, has his sentimental side, it does not run to 
the building of cottages where " flats " are possible. 
He does not always have his way. The older home 
ideal persists, partly because the rapid-transit facili- 
ties are not sufficient to carry a population under 
Harlem conditions, but undoubtedly, too, because of 
the persistence of an ideal. A porch in front and a 



286 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

bit of garden space behind, even if it has to be 
shared with a tenant in the upper half of the two- 
family house, answers to an indestructible instinct in 
humanity. 

The heart of the city broods around its ancient 
town-halls. Its tentacles go everywhere — spindle- 
legged trestles of the new " L " or Subway roads, 
lines of traflSc still in the making, with their girders 
in a brilliant carmine before taking on the final layer 
of gray paint soon to turn to grime. Radiating from 
these arteries are the new-cut streets with monotonous 
rows of two-story dwellings in wood, in red and yellow 
brick. The design is uniform enough to please any 
European General Staff, with tiny porches and flat 
roofs and rectangular back yards. More ambitious are 
the tapestry brick effects with a bit of cornice or 
scroll-work thrown in by the builder to break the long 
roof-line and so appeal to individuality at a slight in- 
crease on the monthly payment. The streets are as 
new as the houses, newer in many cases, where the 
contractor has driven his foundations across the green- 
sward of a lawn or a line of vegetable-gardens and 
left the street to be put in. If you catch the builder 
in the midst of his work, you may discern here or 
there the weather-beaten ruin of what was the old 
manor-house before an estate turned into " acreage." 
It stands square, aloof, unreconciled, with the ugliest 



THE CITY'S RAGGED EDGES 287 

conceivable little tower or observatory, to recall the 
time when it looked out on its own great spaces. 

The nearer these new streets lie to the heart of 
congestion, the humbler are the new rows of houses, 
brick or frame. They are working-class homes for 
people who, with the best of rapid transit, cannot 
afford to get away far from their places of employ- 
ment. The more ambitious lower middle class gravi- 
tates to the remoter edges of the city. For the present 
we are in the single-fare area. An artist would call 
these new streets mean. They are, surely enough, 
mean in their squat, boxlike construction, which even 
a furlong of porches does not relieve from monotony, 
a furlong of porches all exactly alike. They are 
mean, raw, with their diminutive gardens, their micro- 
scopic grass-plots, the embryo trees in their iron 
perambulators, which may some day attain dignity 
and shade, provided the march of population does 
not wipe out the individual homes before the trees 
have attained growth, and piled up flats on their site. 

But the sociologist, as against the artist, finds a 
certain compensating beauty in these dull rows of 
new brick. They speak for the survival of a very 
old prejudice, the home with its own chimney and 
its own front steps. This may be all superstition. 
There is nothing in the eternal scheme which decrees 
that the perfect home must have its own grass-plot. 



288 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

There is every reason to suppose that love and fidelity 
may thrive in an elevator apartment. But still the 
old tradition is there, so that, after all, the sociologist 
who takes satisfaction in the long line of individual 
chimneys is something of an artist in his affection for 
the traditional. He is once more on social ground 
when he thinks of children. Those drear rows of 
little porches mean a higher average daily amount of 
sunlight for the baby-carriage population, and 
directly, too, a freer day for the mothers in the 
kitchens. So that really a great deal of human value 
attaches itself to the mean contractors* dreams in 
cheap brick and lawns, soon to be fenced, alas ! with 
large, white clam-shells. 

While the old city is growing out into the twilight 
zone from its congested center, the communities on 
the outer fringe are reaching forward in their turn 
to bridge the gap. Because he has more elbow-room, 
the builder in the farther suburbs operates on a large 
scale. He thinks in terms of entire " developments/* 
He plans sections, " home parks,** and his ideal is 
not the solid block of houses attached or semi- 
detached, but the strictly individual home on its 
minimum of 60 by 100. Ornamental pillars mark the 
boundaries of these home parks. There are ambitious 
boulevards, miniature Champs lElysees, with their 
central plots of trees, shrubbery, and flowers. 



THE CITY'S RAGGED EDGES 289 

Where natural water is at hand in the shape of an 
ancient pond, it is utilized. If there is an inlet, 
or the shore itself is near, there arise harbor de- 
velopments. Piers are built, anchorages, a club- 
house for community use. These are homes intended 
for the fairly prosperous, and there is a correspond- 
ing stress on social and recreational opportunities. 
The real-estate operator here works as a city builder, 
and in the club-house, whether for water sports or 
golf and tennis, he supplies a nucleus for community 
life. He has his speculator's luck. Sometimes his 
home parks fill up and attach themselves as new 
suburbs to the old villages which the metropolis has 
annexed. Often he has miscalculated his market, and 
the outer fringes of the city are dotted with home 
parks that have everything but homes. Between the 
stone pillars at one end of the park and the stone 
pillars at the other end, the boulevard with its young 
trees and shrubbery runs empty of houses, except for 
the solitary mansion which the contractor has put 
up to break the monotony of the waste spaces and 
as an incentive to home-builders. 



Ill 



Walking in the outer suburbs is a fascinating exer- 
cise because of the real-estate operator who has filled 



290 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

the landscape with surprises. You have reached the 
outskirts of the city. Before you lies a primitive 
vista^ fields as far as the eye can reach, a good deal 
of marsh, some old trees in the foreground, and per- 
haps a bit of water large enough for skating in winter. 
Or there may be a tangle of dwarf timber and scrub 
running clear to the horizon, unbroken by those deadly 
enemies of rural beauty, the factory chimney and the 
gas-tank. Looking across the waste of brush and 
fallow, one might imagine it melting into the prairies 
of the West, and so on to the Pacific. You scent 
the genuine primitive, the real thing, at the farthest 
pole from the suburban. To your right, a path, a 
real country path, leads through a grove. So you 
follow it, prepared for adventure, feeling something 
like Stanley or Captain Scott. 

In two minutes you are through the grove and slap 
up against a steam-shovel. Across the field runs a 
gash a quarter of a mile long, and it is crossed by 
^ve similar scars. They are new streets. The sign- 
posts are up, though the street is only in the making — 
Jefferson Avenue, Franklin Avenue, Clinton Avenue — 
our revolutionary period being the most prolific source 
of nomenclature for the suburban builder. The 
steam-shovel strikes the motive in a symphony of 
raw matter and ugly tools. You turn the corner 
from the primitive, and land in a litter of clay, pitch. 



THE CITY^S RAGGED EDGES 291 

crushed stone, lime, sand, earthen and iron piping of 
all dimensions, from sewer-mains to electric conduits, 
a desolation of barrels, planking, staves, sieves. Here 
is the primitive sod with the field flowers still clinging 
close, and hard by the mortar-troughs are steaming. 
Behind you is green forest patch, and before you a 
road-machine crunching away at its meal of broken 
stone. In the short space of a city block there are 
all the geological strata of the modern street in the 
making — ^the original yellow soil, the layer of broken 
stone, the same stone subdued and powdered, the 
same stone wearing its black asphalt coat, the black 
of the asphalt wearing its ceremonial frosting of 
white sand. At one end of the block Sicilian laborers 
sweat over their spades; in the middle of the block 
negro laborers sweat in the fume of the asphalt- 
kettle; at the other end of the block Sicilians again 
are thumping out the last roughnesses in the completed 
pavement of a model street in a model home develop- 
ment. Walking in the suburbs always has these little 
surprises in store. They are not what an artist would 
enjoy emerging suddenly from the dank freshness of 
marsh and woodland. It is only the rising urban 
tide lapping up the wilderness. 

But even the artist, I imagine, would find compen- 
sation in the raw scene if his eye rests, as it is bound 
to do, on the human figures in the ugly setting. Two 



292 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

hundred years from now, when the descendants of the 
Italian immigrant wish to honor their pioneer fore- 
fathers in America, after the manner of the Maif- 
fiower, they will have the model for their commemo- 
rative monument predetermined. For the Puritan 
father with his musket, they, will have the Sicilian 
with his pickax or spade, and the name inscribed on 
the monument base will be ** The Builders." In the 
course of a vast amount of generalization about our 
old immigration and our new immigration and their 
effects on the physical type of the new American, 
there has grown up the foolish idea of this country 
as overrun by hordes of physical mongrels, ignoble 
of feature, squat, uncouth, a reversion to primitive 
anthropology. It is a notion built up largely on 
externals or on the pictures of the immigrant as he 
leaves Ellis Island, in his original garb and with his 
original baggage. Or else it is a picture largely 
drawn from the market crowds of the East Side. 

I venture my own opinion that the Italian laborer, 
as you find him in the city ditches, or, better still, 
building roads and foundations for suburban homes, 
is as attractive a type as we have in our great popula- 
tion mass. This is not true of the Sicilian women, 
who undoubtedly wither and age in our slums faster 
even than in their native olive-groves. But the men, 
at work, are splendid. They are not a tall race, 



THE CITY'S RAGGED EDGES 293 

but they have magnificient chests under their cotton 
shirts. Their arms suggest both the texture as well 
as the color of bronze, and their faces, for the most 
part, are patrician — thin, straight noses; well-cut 
mouths; strong, square chins; a good brow as a rule, 
under crisp hair; and the flashing, black, Mediter- 
ranean eye. The face shining through its sweat, 
dimmed with fatigue toward the late hours of the 
afternoon, is as fine a mask as we have to show among 
our people. It is hard to rid oneself of the daily 
cant of the newspaper. But if you will put aside 
the Black Hand and the bomb as characterizing an 
entire race, there is strength and beauty in the groups 
of laborers whom you see almost everywhere on sum- 
mer evenings, trudging home with their dinner-pails 
and their coats over their arms, the glint of brown 
muscles, the splendid torsos, the cheerful faces — I 
have heard them sing on their way home from work — 
and, when they are not singing, they chatter, half a 
dozen tongues at once producing music that is straight 
from the Mediterranean, as different from the trav- 
estied *' Wop " dialect of the vaudeville stage as the 
"Walkiire ** music is from rag-time. The Italian 
laborer has only begun to get out of the ditch. He 
has reached the surface as road-builder. He has 
begun to climb the scaffolding as mason. The highest 
levels of the builder's art are as yet not for him. 



294 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

The men who swing on steel girders three hundred 
feet in the air are still from the masterful Celtic 
race. But the time will come for the Italian; he, 
too, will swing over the heads of the crowd and 
wield the pneumatic riveter. He has the physique, 
and I imagine he has the nerves. His contribution to 
the melting-pot will be sound enough, I believe. 



IT 



There are areas within our Greater Cities where 
the real-estate operator does more than develop — 
he creates the soil to build upon. He reclaims marsh 
lands on the border of navigable waters, and he fills 
up shallows. "Water-front" property holds an 
appeal more genuine than Herald Square, since the 
pleasures it promises are attainable and attained. A 
permanent home that shall be at the same time a 
summer place for the man of very moderate means — 
the thing can be done. On the shores of inland waters 
home sites have been built up by great suction-pumps, 
which have drawn the sand from the channels and 
piled it upon the flats. The acres of white sand looK 
raw enough in the making. Another summer sees 
them fitted out with a dressing of top soil and a fairish 
coat of grass, with modern streets, piped, curbed, and 
shaded with saplings, and the entire area well-sown. 



THE CITY'S BAGGED EDGES 296 

by an artist in practical effects, with bungalows. The 
little houses swarm over the flat ground like a flock 
of chicks around the mother hen, in the shape of a 
pretentious mansion, with spacious and well-screened 
porches — the club-house. The mansion and the first 
bungalows are bait, but legitimate enough, especially 
when you consider the prices asked; a ridiculously 
low sum in hundreds of dollars and fractions of a 
hundred, which, reduced to monthly payments, be- 
comes irresistible, as the thickening growth of the 
bungalow crop with the recurring summers plainly 
testifies. 

The sociological function of the bungalow will some 
day be written up by the Carnegie Foundation for 
the Advancement of Science. From its native habitat 
on the Pacific coast, the bungalow was transplanted 
to the East as a summer plaything, but has refused 
to be so confined and has reasserted its permanence, 
without losing its original appeal as a place of dalli- 
ance in hot weather. This double function suits 
admirably the real-estate promoter's purposes. The 
summer is the season when the townsman finds the 
urge of country life strongest, and the bungalow is 
the architectural form through which country life 
presents itself with a sense of freedom from responsi- 
bility, of casualness almost, which one does not usually 
associate with the stern regime of the commuter. 



296 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

In terms of the bungalow the suburbanite's progress 
may often be traced. From a summer vacation at the 
beach hotel or boarding-house he evolves into a sum- 
mer tenant of a bungalow all to himself. With that, 
the germ of ownership has entered the blood, and it 
is nourished by the large real-estate hoardings along 
the railway line, from which the bungalow tenant 
learns that for the cost of a season's rent he might 
own his own bungalow. The sense of running down 
to your own little place in the country is coupled with 
the argument that if you get tired of running down 
to your little place you can give it up after a year 
or two and you are not out of pocket. And the ease 
of life in a bungalow, the freedom of the tent with- 
out the rain coming in, the exemption from social 
proprieties, the feeling that one can economize with- 
out shame in a bungalow, whereas in a full-grown 
house it means losing caste — in other words, to be 
foot-loose and comfortable — conquers. 

He buys, and with that he is tied to the soil. He 
will not tire of his bungalow. Instead he will begin 
tinkering with it and beautifying it and expanding it. 
The onset is insidious. It begins probably with a 
garden patch ten feet by ten, built up of soil brought 
in a wagon. The first summer will be taken up with 
the garden, but toward the beginning of September 
the need of a little storehouse for the garden tools 



THE CITY'S RAGGED EDGES 297 

will become manifest, and the first offshoot to the 
bungalow will appear, a mere shed with a door, but 
enough. The next spring plans will be germinating 
for a further extension. Another room or two would 
come in useful, especially for the purpose of housing 
an occasional week-end guest who has been invited 
down to study the progress of the garden. The process 
now moves on with cumulative speed. The bungalow 
spreads out laterally over the ground and vertically 
into the soul of the proprietor. The summer vacations 
grow longer. The process of rebuilding continues 
until the original bungalow has disappeared and a 
full-fledged home stands in its place. The monthly 
commutation ticket has become a habit. La corn- 
media e finita. 

Thus individualism, working through the bungalow, 
and business working through the " home park," com- 
bine to fill up the interstices of the Greater City. 
The home park idea carried to its farthest limit be- 
comes the garden city. Our American garden cities 
approach their model, Golder's Green of Greater 
London, in something more than the invocation of the 
medieval spirit through Tudor brick, gables, dormer 
windows, and leaded panes. There is a certain 
spiritual development. The garden city draws to 
itself the freer spirits of the community, those, that is, 
who possess the right combination of sociological 



298 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

emancipation, artistic taste, and sufficient income. 
Like London's Hampstead, our only full-sized garden 
city has more than its proportion of writers, artists, 
teachers, workers in the utilitarian branches of jour- 
nalism and the magazines, social experts. The theater 
and its allied arts are not so well represented, because 
with us the theater has not won the established posi- 
tion it has in London. At least, members of the 
Century Club or the National Institute of Arts and 
Sciences do not repair to theatrical shrines the way 
distinguished men in London make pilgrimages to 
Anna Pavlowa*s villa in Hampstead. Yet the atmos- 
phere of our garden city is bohemian enough to go 
with the rather precious beauty of its architecture, 
the grandiose railway station in red sandstone, the 
handsome octagonal clock tower, the village green 
which lacks only the thatched roofs and the color of 
years to be a reproduction of Merrie England. 

The garden city at first sight is so much of a toy 
city that one finds with surprise real commuters 
departing in the morning for real tasks in town, 
and returning in the evening to real wives and babies. 
Perhaps it is because we have grown accustomed to 
accept urban ugliness as a necessity that one cannot 
escape something of the feeling of make-believe in 
this beautiful spot set down bodily out of the six- 
teenth century on the edge of our appalling urban 



THE CITY'S RAGGED EDGES 299 

industrialism. The inhabitants, in striving to think 
themselves away from a city of five millions and back 
into the old community of common interests, develop 
a certain degree of self-consciousness. In the garden 
city the residents are much more absorbed in the 
problem of building up the local post-office than in 
the city itself they showed in grim civic conditions 
just aroimd the corner. The pride of the residents 
combines with the paternal care of the development 
company to foster the old neighborliness, through 
clubs athletic and educational, housewives* associa- 
tions, and lectures on mosquito destruction illustrated 
with motion-pictures. If one wished to be cruel one 
might call it playing at being a community; and yet 
it is hard to see how one can be a pioneer and a model 
without being self-conscious in the matter. 

For that is what our garden city aspires to be — 
a pioneer. In its architecture it is a revolt both 
against the cheap monotony of the long blocks of 
attached or semi-detached brick and frame houses of 
the humbler suburbs and the architectural anarchy 
of more pretentious villadom, which is sometimes suc- 
cessful and sometimes runs into rococo and ginger- 
bread. To build in accordance with one's tastes and 
yet in conformity with a general plan of beauty and 
utility is the lesson the garden city inculcates. When 
its example has found sufficient imitation on the part 



300 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

of private enterprise, and it is being imitated with 
the years, the toy city will lose its air of make-believe. 
When we have grown accustomed to beauty we shall 
escape the first impression that, a thing is unreal 
because it is so charming. Personally, my feeling is 
that the architects of the garden city ought not to 
go back so faithfully to four centuries ago and gabled 
roofs with old English lettering on the inn signs. 
To the irreverent it smacks a bit of rathskeller 
architecture. I should like the architects to develop 
a beautiful domestic architecture out of modern condi- 
tions in so far as the thing can be done. Ultimately, 
we shall have our blend of the Tudor, the bungalow, 
the Colonial, and contemporary standards in sanitary 
plumbing. 

For your real-estate promoter knows how to utilize 
the sense of beauty and the sense of historic values 
as well as the values of Herald Square. He digs 
up ancient local traditions. A legend of the Revolu- 
tionary War, for example, is of distinct commercial 
value. The time has passed for the Victorian names 
ending in "hurst" and "mere." The aboriginal 
names are sought for, and if the tradition of an old 
Indian camping-ground can be made to justify an 
Indian name for a new home site, so much the better, 
it speaks for our complex human nature that we should 
like to live in a place called Neponsit, less than an 
hour from Broadway. 



